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How to Become a Great JavaScript Developer

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Re: How to Become a Great JavaScript Developer

#111

Post by fsloth »

91bananas wrote: post #54
murbard2 wrote: post #12

Missing advice: learn to program well in a few well designed programming language. JavaScript was designed in 10 days and the main reason it still exists today is incredibly strong path dependence. There's nothing wrong with wanting to become a great JavaScript developer, but one needs to become a great developer first, and JavaScript just isn't conducive to that.

I personally am so over this argument. Sure, that is roughly a fact about the time in which it was designed... but that was 20 years ago. Since then there has been a team of some of the best programmers in the world maintaining and advancing the language.

"Since then there has been a team of some of the best programmers in the world maintaining and advancing the language."

If you build a church from chewing gum and then get Gustaf Eiffel to design a few towers to it from steel with furbishments by Antonio Gaudi the fact still remains there is a heap of melting gum at the bottom.

Stuff that needs to be designed up front cannot be fixed after the fact regardless of the amount of ducktape and personell applied.

Re: How to Become a Great JavaScript Developer

#112

Post by dj_doh »

gfodor wrote: post #99
smlacy wrote: post #90

No. Not this. Net even close to this. Let me illustrate: How to become great at Sports: - Read books about sports. - Watch other people play sports. - Read in-depth analysis of past sports games. How to become great at Playing Violin: - Read books about playing violin. - Real sheet music by the great masters. - Listen to many concerts. It's inherently obvious that the above approaches are totally and completely wrong…

A professional software engineer should be regularly reading to keep up with their craft. It's a balance, and one that I've generally noticed is tipped away from focused reading/learning because the modern Stack Overflow-driven world nudges people to "just do it." Telling people "you should read a lot of books" shouldn't be necessary, but nowadays it is.

In one of my recent interviews, I was asked how do I learn a new language. I rely on good 'ol practice of reading from top to bottom intertwined with YouTube, conf videos and blogs. This highly experienced architect called my approach non-agile. He was expecting me to take a quick and dirty SO-route for fast results.

Re: How to Become a Great JavaScript Developer

#113

Post by petercooper »

ludwigvan wrote: post #80
petercooper wrote: post #43

Fancy linking up http://javascriptweekly.com/ where it's mentioned? :-) Not everyone knows where it is. Thanks!

Just did. Thanks for the weekly btw :)

No worries, thanks! We'll hopefully be linking this up on Friday too!

Re: How to Become a Great JavaScript Developer

#115

Post by dj_doh »

Read a book or six top to bottom, mix it with video and blog posts focusing on concepts that are deemed complex or critical in that subject.

Build general purpose libraries, plugins, micro-framework or personal projects. Follow-up by validating your work with your community or sample audience. I have been taking the later route.

When it's done. Read some more and build some more. Put it on a repeat loop. Look for some variation as it brings different perspectives.

Re: How to Become a Great JavaScript Developer

#116

Post by msluyter »

lacker wrote: post #107
o_____________o wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Knowledge work is different. How to become great at Chess: - Read books about chess. - Watch other people play chess. - Read in-depth analysis of past chess games. How to become great at Math: - Read books about math. - Watch other people perform math. - Read in-depth analysis of math. You also skipped a key assertion from the author: "Do exercises and try to explain common JavaScript concepts such as inheritance in…

I don't think that's actually the best way to be great at chess, or math. On chess, from a GM: "The key to their success is that they kept playing a lot, and learning from stronger opponents. Don't get me wrong: I am not suggesting stone age technologies in studying. Of course, you should take advantage of the best modern learning methods. However, the most important component of success (at least at weak GM and belo…

Well, wrt chess, we can have dueling GM quote battles over this point:

From "Andrei Istratescu's top 10 reasons for stagnation:"

1) Too much play Playing chess - practice - is very important for improvement. When you play chess (over the board, at tournaments), you put into practice what you have learned, you use your brain to think chess, you are in the testing environment, you test your accumulated knowledge and skill against another person. However, too much play and too little study holds you back. You can repeat the same mistakes over and over. You will tend to follow your own old patterns and not have time to develop a different, correct thinking process, and to learn proper strategy and new ideas. In this case, you should take a long break from playing and concentrate only on study for several months. You will make a significant improvement.

In my experience, the first chess book I read (Logical Chess, Move by Move) probably bumped my rating by 400 points. Then, more specialized openings and tactics books another couple hundred. After that, simply playing got me mostly nowhere.

Re: How to Become a Great JavaScript Developer

#117

Post by danbruc »

Become great in language X seems the wrong goal to me. An enormous amount of things and at the same time the most important things that make you a great software developer are completely language agnostic. And I would argue they are harder to learn through the lens of a single language and software stack. You then still have to become a productive software developer knowing your libraries and tools and their quirks but this seems secondary to me and easily compensated by your favorite search engine. Or by example - knowing when to use a set as opposed to a list is more important than knowing in which namespace you can find the implementations for language X.

Re: How to Become a Great JavaScript Developer

#119

Post by nostrademons »

eanplatter wrote: post #110
smlacy wrote: post #90

No. Not this. Net even close to this. Let me illustrate: How to become great at Sports: - Read books about sports. - Watch other people play sports. - Read in-depth analysis of past sports games. How to become great at Playing Violin: - Read books about playing violin. - Real sheet music by the great masters. - Listen to many concerts. It's inherently obvious that the above approaches are totally and completely wrong…

Maybe I'm in a minority, but I've never read a programming book that didn't have me writing and testing out code in my console while I read. Also, the kinds of things I tried out on my own while reading were unique and new. Not the kind of things I would necessarily run into in my job. Doing is one thing, but if I just keep doing with my current knowledge then it's easy to fall into a situation where improvement is m…

Exercises are very different from projects. When you support a project over the long-term, you engage a very different set of skills than what you'll get in a book. You learn how to push your way through a seemingly unsolvable bug that nobody has encountered before, often one in code that you didn't write. You learn how to make technical choices that reduce the likelihood of encountering these bugs. You learn how to come back to your program in a few months and pick up where you left off, and what sorts of coding practices will inhibit this. You learn what sorts of bugs occur in practice, and how to avoid them. You learn how to diagnose performance problems, how to speed them up, when to speed them up, and you build up a mental model of how the systems you work with behave. You learn how to limit complexity, and what the complexity budget of your brain is, and how to break up projects so that you stay within that budget. You learn how to communicate with other programmers, and what they care about. You learn how to build up a codebase incrementally, how software evolves, and how the why of the code usually matters more than the how. You learn how to communicate with users, and how to accept their input, and how to weigh the costs of their feature requests against the complexity of the code base.

All of these are emergent problems that only occur when you work with large, long-lived software systems. You won't get them out of a book.

Re: How to Become a Great JavaScript Developer

#120

Post by fridek »

notNow wrote: post #96
fridek wrote: post #8

The best thing that happened to me as a JavaScript developer was being exposed to other languages. Especially the not-so-fancy Java and C++, really opened my mind about structuring code and planning for a long-term project. Knowing JavaScript and JavaScript frameworks is surprisingly useless for the type of work JS devs usually handle. The documentation often consists of TodoMVC type of examples and approaches. Hardl…

Why would a front-end system be more complex than its back-end counterpart? It just doesn't make any sense.

I never said it should be more complex. It, however, should be also structured somehow. There is a persistence layer, models, collections, services reasoning about them and pipelines aggregating and rendering things.

Well written JavaScript is reasonably fast and it now makes sense to optimize transported information size. Many calculations can be done front-end side then, which accidentally is also more cost-effective, since data center usage is paid, while user CPUs are more or less free (and not doing much while browsing anyway).

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