Your Javascript Tool Belt
Its your Tool Belt. Be proud of it!
Recently I have been writing a Javascript series called Rewriting Javascript, which shows off new ways in which Javascript allows us to mix up the old standards. That is what is part of the fun about Javascript to me, its changing and evolving, constantly presenting new problems and new solutions.
But this constant evolution its difficult to keep up with. Adding more weight to the situation, toolsets are ever changing and evolving faster than the language itself. Whats here today is gone tomorrow in Javascript land. This is all to say that learning Javascript is hard and understanding your tooling can be even harder.
But I am not here to write a piece about Javascript burnout. Im here to encourage you to explore new features and innovations at your own pace. Not the pace that medium or twitter thinks you should be learning, but instead the pace at which your life, desires, and job allows.
🔧 The Tool Belt Example 🔨
In your Tool Belt, assembled over years of home repair and weekend projects, you have several useful items. One of those items is a hammer, who’s main purpose is to drive nails into wood. You can effectively and efficiently use your hammer to create any wooden object your mind can dream up and your wallet can afford. Your a happy and effective hammer aficionado.
But there’s a new tool on the market, the nail gun. Marketers boast that it can nail faster and more accurately than any hammer before it. Some even say that on command it can spin and catch on fire! 🔥 Its a marvel of modern human innovation.
You feel left out, not owning the newest nail gun because life, work, and a myriad of other reasons have prevented you from educating yourself on the nail gun. But if we think about the nail gun it can really only do one thing, drive nails into wood. Much the same as you can with your fine tuned and hard earned hammer skills. Does this make the nail gun an useless tool? No, it is still a very valuable tool, but it is just that, a tool. Of which there are many that can accomplish the same goal.
This is how you should view Javascript. ES6 introduced a bunch of great new tools that help you get the job done. But those tools are only advancements on the tools already available to you before ES6. They are valuable tools, but in the end they are just another tool in your tool belt. Every project does not require you to pull out the nail gun, or even know how to use the nail gun. Much like every project does not require react, redux, webpack and so on.
Just because you see a new feature in the Javascript API does not mean you have to stop everything your doing to learn the newest and greatest. Learn at your own pace, and don’t get sucked in or demoralized by those who insist that you spend all your time learning.
I mean… we eventually have to ship 🚀 production code.
Thanks For Reading! 💚
Thanks for taking the time to read this article! I appreciate and value every recommend, comment (nice or mean), and follow!
Useful Reading
If and when you are ready to dive into some new Javascript concepts, at your own pace of course, here are some lovely tutorials and articles by the great guys at Mozilla.
- ES6 In Depth — covers ES6 topics by the guys who implemented it in Firefox!
- Let and Const
- Arrow Functions
- Template Strings
