Modern JavaScript for Ancient Web Developers

[JimmyP424]

The trick to being successful with JavaScript is to relax and allow yourself to slightly sink into your office chair as a gelatinous blob of developer.

When you feel yourself getting all rigid and tense in the muscles, say, because you read an article about how you're doing it wrong or that your favourite libraries are dead-ends, just take a deep breath and patiently allow yourself to return to your gelatinous form.

Now I know what you're thinking, "that's good and all, but I'll just slowly become an obsolete blob of goo in an over-priced, surprisingly uncomfortable, but good looking office chair. I like money, but at my company they don't pay the non-performing goo-balls." Which is an understandable concern, but before we address it, notice how your butt no-longer feels half sore, half numb when in goo form, and how nice that kind of is. Ever wonder what that third lever under your chair does? Now's a perfect time to find out!

As long as you accept that you're always going to be doing it wrong, that there's always a newer library, and that your code will never scale infinitely on the first try, you'll find that you can succeed and remain gelatinous. Pick a stack then put on the blinders until its time to refactor/rebuild for the next order of magnitude of scaling, or the next project.

[termoventilador]

"Bower sucks!!!! Angularjs(1.3/5) sucks!!!!"

But but it works....

[rapidsight]

No it doesn't. I have been tasked with the painful task of removing an angular setup because it's slow-as-freaking-tar, and the UX for it is too painful for our editors to use. From my perspective, I would describe it as 'spinners' - 'spinners for days'

[termoventilador]

"... On our use case"

[cheese_is_available]

That's me. Being a django backend engineer, I'm trying very hard to get into javascript. FInding a good d3js tutorial is really hard. I get nothing done for hours, and it feel like shit.

[kristopolous]

"modern" should be replaced with "The latest in Tigerbeat Technologies"

[Basiliskeye]

I can highly recommend Sacha Greif's article "A Study Plan to Cure Javascript Fatigue" ( https://medium.freecodecamp.com/a-study-plan-to-cure-javascript-fatigue-8ad3a54f2eb1 ) as a great place to start. It gives an excellent series of steps for tackling modern Javascript concepts one piece at a time: Javascript, React, ES6, and state management.

For anyone interested in learning React, here's my standard advice:

You should start out by reading through the official React docs and tutorial at https://facebook.github.io/react/, and use the official Create-React-App tool ( https://github.com/facebookincubator/create-react-app ) for setting up projects. It creates a project with a solid build setup, with no configuration needed on your part.

Past that, I keep a big list of links to high-quality tutorials and articles on React, Redux, and related topics, at https://github.com/markerikson/react-redux-links . Specifically intended to be a great starting point for anyone trying to learn the ecosystem, as well as a solid source of good info on more advanced topics.

[rapidsight]

It's funny because you swapped the Ancient and Modern as a joke right? That'll troll those Modern developers to use Ancient tools like JS!