It’s easy enough to be tasked with a small bug, run the app locally, put breakpoints, and debug the code using Chrome Developer Tools. It’s easy enough to be assigned a small user story that adds a dropdown to a form and requires modification to the form payload, and to follow the practices set forth by the senior UI developers on the team when submitting a pull request against master for the user story. That’s what got me hooked in the first place. I love the instant gratification aspect of front-end development, and I love creating reusable components.
I started with Java, an object-oriented language, unlike JavaScript, a dynamic language. Most of my college courses and projects were extensively in Java. The programming mindset I had obtained from learning Java helped tremendously at hackathons and at internships, even though they were web dev. I experimented with Telerik, a platform for hybrid app development, at my first hackathon, and to the astonishment of my team, we won first place. I worked with Angular 1.0 at my first internship, ventured into the realm of Node.js at the next one, then Polymer in my first rotation of the career accelerator program for which I work full-time, and finally, React/Redux in my second rotation.
Notice a common theme?
A lot of tinkering, a lot of JavaScript frameworks, a lot of that scrappy perseverance to ship code, and a whole lot of Googling and StackOverflow. And yet, the focus on fundamentals is mysteriously absent.
In other words... does anyone remember learning how to manually find the derivative of a polynomial using the definition of a derivative and what a pain it was? Then finding sweet salvation in the power rule?
What does that have to do with anything? Well, when you think about it, you fully understand and appreciate what you’re doing when using the power rule because the previous way was more tedious. If you had started out differentiating with the power rule, you were essentially taking a shortcut. In a similar way, I’ve consistently skipped to using the JavaScript equivalent of the power rule and hacking together solutions and as a result, I’m rusty on JavaScript fundamentals and understanding both the power and limitations of vanilla JavaScript. Why React? Why Node? Why Vue? Why Backbone? Why Ember? The answer to the why can only be found in the basics.
And back to the basics I go. 🚀
Top comments (1)
Thanks for sharing the thoughts. As a developer who is still in the early stage of career, i can really understand. There is time when i feel the pain of overhead or issues coming from dependency library before i realize the benefit of it. Maybe only after you have a full image of the story behind a framework/lib, you can appreciate the efforts and work the contributors do.