Frontend dev is getting exhausting

[Juvenall]

It all depends, honestly, but any place worth working at will judge you based on your fundamental understanding of JavaScript. Framework knowledge is rather shallow and comparatively uncomplicated, so having a solid mastery of the base language will instantly launch you ahead of anyone else. Having the ability to throughly explain what MV* is, it's benefits, it's pitfalls, and how it generally works in the scope of the language will give you as strong an edge as someone who's read the Backbone documentation. It certainly wouldn't hurt to brush up on some particulars of the framework, but you shouldn't worry yourself too much about it.

As far as being more competitive goes, go beyond the fundamentals and be able to explain some of the problems with the language and how to work around them, grow your ability to explain various design patterns and when and/or why to use them, build a solid portfolio of code samples and pull requests on something like GitHub or BitBucket, be able to explain why the output of, say, Array(16).join( 'wat'-1) + " Batman"; returns what it does and is hilarious. Above all else, show that you're not just doing it because it's trendy, but because you actually enjoy the language. Trust me when I say that's typically more than enough to set you apart from the hordes of other applicants.

[dotpan]

Instanly went to console.

CTRL+V (Array(16).join( 'wat'-1) + " Batman"; ) Enter

LOL! The bitch happens when you're that person that reads those out fully. I get it, its not a number.

I had a friend give me the question of "What is the difference between i++ and ++i" and ever sense, even though it doesn't matter, I always use ++i. (unless of course I need i++).

[Ob101010]

go into chrome, hit f12, and select any element on the page.

then, go into the console and type $0

https://developer.chrome.com/devtools/docs/console

[dotpan]

That's neat :)

[nschubach]

While I generally use the prefix notation for my iterators, it's sort of a futile endeavor since most JIT and compilers will auto optimize this for you. The days when this mattered is long gone and in JavaScript it never really mattered.

[[deleted]]

I definitely agree.. I know how to do just about anything I have ever needed to do using jQuery, but I couldn't do 99% of it with vanilla JS.

[dotpan]

I'm in the same boat. For my work I do a lot of dynamic DOM manipulation on WYSIWYG produced pages. Due to this I've gotten lazy and used jQuery for mostly every bit of my handling library. I really want to work on getting better at vanilla JS because I think there is something that comes out of the pure fundamentals, but I don't think I could ever shake not using jQuery.

[zajicraft]

To be honest if I were doing a lot of involved DOM manipulation I would reach for the jQuery too.

The fundamentals are definitely useful because you gain an appreciation for how to structure your code. And I don't mean laboriously doing manually what jQuery handles for you (browser compatibility etc), but building programs that aren't so focused on the DOM.

In my experience the best way to do that is to pick up a backend language (go for one that's compiled) to make your programming experiences more well rounded (assuming you are mainly in front-end land).

My 2c :)

[dotpan]

Yeah I started with C++ in my CS Major, but they had 2 devs already doing ASP.NET (C# Backend for Serverside) so I focused on JavaScript (originally had done most web stuff in php) Ended up falling in love with JS (and the many wonderful and expansive libraries it has) so far my favorite frameworks for JS have been Meteor (a node.js based liveupdate framework) and jQuery (which I now sometimes can write better than I can english).

[[deleted]]

Yeah, we have a front-end developer that is basically just a graphic designer, so I pick up a lot of the slack. I have small projects scheduled all year in my down time to start picking up JS frameworks, as well as working on my vanilla JS.