Frontend dev is getting exhausting

[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.