How it feels to learn JavaScript in 2016 • Hacker News Board

Re: How it feels to learn JavaScript in 2016

#231

Post by marrs » Wed, Oct 05, 2016, 11:50 AM UTC

cocktailpeanuts wrote: post #160

marrs wrote: post #65

In my experience, the developers who fall into this trap of despair almost always do so because they aren't consciously choosing what tools to use; instead they are letting the tools choose them. They see job descriptions demanding AngularJS or ReactJS and they think that they must learn it, or someone posts an article here and they don't want to feel left behind. Choose a library or tool because it improves your dev…

In my experience, it's not the developers who fall into this trap, it's the culture--nobody wants to learn some random technology that will probably be obsolete in a year (and I'm not even joking when I say this, this really is the reality) The only situation where you are not affected is if you're a freelancer and you don't need to worry about what's going on around you. I'm not going to mention where, but I worked…

This is very true and cool shiny new things are hard to counter, mostly because ones instinct is to point out the deficiency in the "innovation", which is often only obvious to you.

The best way I've found to counter this is to give your own demonstration showing how you achieved the same (or better) coolness with existing technology, and you did it faster, and it can be integrated into the code base today.

This gives your argument real substance and people have to at least now argue against facts and data rather than hand-wavy speculation.

Re: How it feels to learn JavaScript in 2016

#232

Post by marrs » Wed, Oct 05, 2016, 11:58 AM UTC

raverbashing wrote: post #42

marrs wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

and that's how you can use express.js to run a service that uses a different protocol to HTTP. Express is one of the easiest libraries to learn in any programming language. It's certainly much easier to learn than Django, at least in part because it doesn't include the kitchen sink

> and that's how you can use express.js to run a service that uses a different protocol to HTTP. Excuses, excuses. Good defaults are important. 99.99% of developers won't care about it. Getting form data is Web development 101

Let me try again: you might not be using Express to develop a website.

If you are, install the meta-package, or create one. Now you have your defaults.

Re: How it feels to learn JavaScript in 2016

#233

Post by mathgeek » Wed, Oct 05, 2016, 12:36 PM UTC

lloyd-christmas wrote: post #205

marrs wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have to say, this strikes me as an odd way of filtering out bad developers. jQuery is a time-saving library. It seems like you're presuming that they must lack proficiency in the DOM if they're choosing to use jQuery. Perhaps you're trying to say you want to see them demonstrate that they're not just copy/paste coders. Given your code example above, I wouldn't want a candidate to know the difference between each `f…

> I have to say, this strikes me as an odd way of filtering out bad developers. I don't use this in my interviews, and I'm surprised everyone took this literally given that we have a weekly blog article about the villainy of technical interviews and how they destroy the very fabric of software development. I'm using a hyperbolic example to demonstrate what I perceive as a negative trait; A reach for unnecessary tooli…

My original comment was actually in the opposite direction: the interviewers were looking for comfort with a framework other than jQuery that showed that I knew more than vanilla JS. That was the frustrating part.

Re: How it feels to learn JavaScript in 2016

#234

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Oct 06, 2016, 10:01 AM UTC

sangnoir wrote: post #134

mathgeek wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been to more than one interview where I defaulted to jQuery and was immediately disqualified, based on the looks on the interviewers' faces. As a ruby developer, it certainly feels like keeping up-to-date on JS takes more work than the other 90% of languages that I'm familiar with.

> I've been to more than one interview where I defaulted to jQuery and was immediately disqualified Was the role more biased to front end development? Speaking as someone who has been on the other side of the interviewing table, you won't believe the number of people who can use jQuery but are otherwise unfamiliar with vanilla Javascript. I suspect the question itself could have been solved by via plain JS, and you d…

[deleted]

Re: How it feels to learn JavaScript in 2016

#235

Post by chris_wot » Thu, Oct 06, 2016, 1:38 PM UTC

talmand wrote: post #178

chris_wot wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So... ignore them? If you want to use a table for tabular data, then please - use a table! If someone whines you've used a table, then ignore their whining and keep using table markup for tabular data.

Well, ignoring the situation is not a solution to this particular problem.

If it gets really bad, just mock them openly. Sure, you might not achieve your objective, but you'll have fun not getting there.

Re: How it feels to learn JavaScript in 2016

#236

Post by SZJX » Wed, Oct 12, 2016, 11:35 AM UTC

mathgeek wrote: post #216

sangnoir wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I've been to more than one interview where I defaulted to jQuery and was immediately disqualified Was the role more biased to front end development? Speaking as someone who has been on the other side of the interviewing table, you won't believe the number of people who can use jQuery but are otherwise unfamiliar with vanilla Javascript. I suspect the question itself could have been solved by via plain JS, and you d…

> Was the role more biased to front end development? These were Rails positions, which in my experience almost always equates to the same skillset expectations as a front-end engineer.

That probably depends. If the company is really small then you may end up doing quite some frontend work but there can still be significant backend logic going on in Rails.