JavaScript Workshop with Kyle Simpson

A recap of the 5-day JavaScript journey

It has been a couple of months since Kyle, author of the “You Don’t Know JS” series, visited our trivago headquarters and gave us a wonderful JavaScript workshop. It was such an enjoyable week, being able to meet Kyle in person and walk through his thinking behind the materials.

trivago hosts internal workshops and meetups regularly and offers numerous learning opportunities to the employees throughout the year. This time, we decided to do it a little differently. We see the value of open source communities and we want to do our best to support the ecosystem. So, we offered three spots at the workshop for the winners who contributed to Babel or Webpack! Debbie, one of our proud winners, wrote an amazing article about her experience at the workshop. She really did a wonderful job at bringing the passion into the workshop and her article!

The workshop covered a lot of ground. It went from Deep JS Foundations, JavaScript: The Recent Parts, Rethinking Async, and all the way to Functional-Light JS.

I was hooked from day one.

I was fascinated by Kyle’s vivid storytelling for explaining how lexical scope works. There is a certain tradition in learning JavaScript scope, but Kyle found his own way of teaching it and made sense of the concepts like hoisting and closure by explaining the general compile and execution time in JavaScript engines.

At trivago, functional programming is a key part of our Frontend development. We embrace libraries for unidirectional data flow management and reactive programming to scale our products and teams across the company. It was very interesting to see how Kyle built function after function from the ground up. While on the subject of composing functions, Kyle encouraged all of us in the room to be patient with getting used to the functional way of thinking and be mindful with practicing functional programming. He pointed out that he had seen teams abusing chaining functions and made the codebases unmaintainable.

Throughout the workshop, Kyle addressed that human-to-human communication is the purpose of higher level programming languages like JavaScript. He encouraged us to be empathetic while developing and think about how our colleagues could maintain our work and build features on top of it. I believe this is a message that suits all engineers. We all take part in cultivating our team cultures and the effort that we put into fostering the right mindset will eventually reflect in our products.

The moment I sat down in the workshop, I was not only ready to learn, but also to be influenced. We were very fortunate that Kyle is a teacher who is ready to connect.

Thank you, open source winners and participants, for contributing to the community, and thank you, all JavaScript lovers, for coming to the workshop! It wouldn’t be so fruitful without all of your discussions.

Thank you, Kyle, for the fun workshop. We were very lucky to have you.

Originally published by Daw-Chih Liou at tech.trivago.com on 15 October 2018.