“Modern javascript, annotated (updated)”: An Epilogue
After a long day of Javascript self-education—full of equal parts determination, frustration, and giddiness—I brain-dumped all these feelings in one marked-up screenshot of the code I was working on. I shared it with a friend on Twitter, and then updated it to share with some helpful folks I was chatting with in the #redux Discord channel:
Then I went to bed. Then the internet did its thing. And here I am, feeling all weird about it, disabling Tweetbot notifications like I’m Jennifer Aniston or something.
What I created was effectively a cartoon. I guess you could call it satire but it’s really much dumber than that, full of insider humor that the more literal among us would read into too much.
(Worse than any of the jokes was the amount of time I spent trying to figure out which OS X app would do the best jokey annotations. Sketch’s arrows are only okay. I miss pre-Evernote Skitch 😢.)
Why this hit so close to home for you
The Javascript those of you reading this probably write today would be unrecognizable to yourself from just two years ago. And it’s so much better than it was before, isn’t it?
Don’t you really fucking love being a Javascript developer these days? I do.
I’m engaged with my work more than ever. I feel more in control of my code. Dependencies are met, easily. I better understand what each library is doing, and I can debug and inspect code with great fluency.
The humor I was striving for in my image—humor that resonated with a lot of you and upset some of you—was rooted in this reality of constant flux Javascript syntax is in these days, how regularly things seem to change and how we all have had these moments of wtf before finally arriving at OMG.
Javascript and the surrounding community is obviously in a much better place than ever before.
I truly appreciate the countless hours of hard work put in by everybody who has contributed to an NPM module, and those at Facebook that open-sourced React and Flux and changed the destiny of UI development, the Webpack crew, Dan Abramov, and everyone who has written a tutorial or recorded a screencast I’ve learned something from. Thank you!
Keep Javascript weird.
