Interview with JavaScript Evangelist: Matthew Maxwell
Matthew is a JavaScript evangelist with eight years of front end web development experience. He spent five years at Clearwire before moving into the startup world. Since then, he has worked with SitePen, CollegeFrog, and others. Matthew is based in Florida and is involved with Startup Weekend there. To learn more about Matthew (and, incidentally, to see more falcons), check out his Bloc mentor profile.
We recently sat down and asked Matthew for some advice on getting started with Front End Development. Here’s what he had to say:
Bloc: Tell us a little about yourself
Matthew: For 8 years, I’ve acquired expertise in developing for the world wide web and I love it. I have a passion to code. Front-end development takes time and dedication to master; however, even as an expert, guidance and help are always beneficial for the learning process.
What drew you to working as a Front End Developer?
Matthew: What’s fascinating about front-end development is the rapid changes in technology. With browser vendors feverishly battling to produce the “next best thing,” we web developers receive more amazing and ever-changing functionality at our fingertips. The bottom-line is that our customers receive a better product and experience.
Bloc: What advice would you give a beginner front end developer on learning advanced front end frameworks like AngularJS?
Matthew: My advice to any beginner would be to first understand native JavaScript before trying to understand the tools that use it. This was my greatest accomplishment because it allows me to, if I so choose, skip the wikis and dive right into the source, which is where I learn the most. It takes some patience and practice because not everyone will write code like you. In JavaScript, there can be multiple ways to do something, and each of them can be correct in their own context.
The second piece of advice is to stand on the shoulders of giants. There are a lot of people out there that are smarter than I am, and I make it a habit to learn as much as I can from them. When I was first learning the JavaScript language, it was not uncommon to see one of my three monitors in the office dedicated to videos of Douglas Crockford or Nicholas Zakas. Research the smartest people in the field, and through some good old fashioned Youtube University, suck as much knowledge from their digital minds as humanly possible. This applies to any framework or library, including Angular.
Third, I would say never be afraid to fail. Some of my greatest successes in programming are actually my biggest failures, like that one time I accidentally forgot a WHERE clause and deleted an entire table in a database…in production…to find out our database replication had been failing for six months. Lesson learned? Don’t deploy directly to production without testing. Luckily we had some redundancy in place that let us rebuild.
Finally, I would say never stop learning. Just because you master something doesn’t mean you’re off the hook. Specifically with JavaScript, for example, the ECMAScript on which it is based is a constantly evolving target. Never be content and always strive to get better every day.
Bloc: We noticed you have considerable experience with both Angular and EmberJS — which would you advise a beginner start with and why?
Matthew: Angular vs Ember is a difficult question. They both have their pros and cons, so I’m not sure I could give you a straight answer. They both make it really easy to get up and running, but Ember is a little more cumbersome if you need something custom done. I love the way Angular leverages HTML attributes and gives you access to directives, and I especially love how Angular encourages sufficient unit testing. I guess I would say, for most of what I’m doing, Angular would win out.
