Don’t give up learning JavaScript.
Quite some time ago, it seemed everyone I knew was using JavaScript to build a web application, web server or socket server. My close circle of developer friends all appeared to be building really cool “slick” responsive user interfaces, with client side frameworks I’d never heard of, while I kept trucking on with Rails during my day job. 😴
I’d be teased daily on Slack with screenshots and videos of UI they’d built. I failed to appreciate the effort taken to learn and build these components because I was using a framework that I thought could do it all.
I had been using Backbone.js and Angular 1.x within a few Ruby on Rails applications at work but never created a standalone application. I’ve been developing web applications using Rails since January 2009 and couldn’t understand why people would want to write all of their application code from scratch. Why give yourself more work? Rails comes with everything, including the kitchen sink.
One morning, early 2015, I decided I would seriously give JavaScript a go. I wanted to show my friends I wasn’t a Rails fanboy. I signed up for CodeSchool and aced their JavaScript course. I immediately felt like a pro. I did my very best using JavaScript in any existing or new Rails application going forward. A few months went by and all I achieved was attaching a few DOM listeners to jQuery plugins.
Fast-forward to February 2016. I had been doing more of the same JS in Rails and not really grasping the power of JavaScript. I realised the only way I could fully understand JavaScript, promises, callbacks and everything else, would be if I were to go cold turkey.
I realised the only way I could fully understand JavaScript, promises, callbacks and everything else, would be if I were to go cold turkey.
I challenged myself to build as many small applications as possible in a week using React. Each time I built something new, I tried to reduce the amount of code by learning more about React and JavaScript. 💯
Previously when I had to learn something new with Ruby or Rails, the accompanying RubyGem README was sufficient. Building a basic Rails app can be quite straightforward when you don’t know Ruby because of the conventions and boilerplate it ships with. Getting started with a SPA in JavaScript was a terrifying experience though.
I highly recommend you find a large JS application on GitHub or browse NPM and read through every line of JavaScript. This is a great way to see how code can be structured, written and reused. It’ll definitely help you begin when you open that first empty JS file. 😱
JavaScript is my “go-to” choice when building new projects today. I really like where the community is headed and there is a fantastic foundation of developer support online. NPM has some great open source modules production ready for your own project too, so you don’t have to write everything from scratch, although, it’s quite nice to!
To further feed my hunger to learn more and go further with JavaScript, I’m going to start publishing tutorials and screencasts teaching people how to write JS and integrate frameworks.
I admit. I could say it’s easy to get started with JavaScript but it’s not. Programming is hard. It took me several attempts learning JavaScript before things started to “click”. If you’ve had to learn another language previously, you’ll know how scary starting out can be.
Get the basics down, understand the syntax and become familiar browsing documentation. The Mozilla Developer Network JavaScript page will guide you along the journey should you wish to dive keeper into the workings of JS.
“If you do what you’ve always done, you’ll get what you’ve always gotten.” — Tony Robbins
Never stop learning. Thank you 😘 Sammy and Liam for inspiring me to go further with JavaScript, in particular React.
