Stop fighting and embrace the JS

I've slowly come to the belief that if you want to keep working on front-end web development, you are going to need to get your JavaScript skills pretty polished.

I've been using JavaScript for a long time, but only through the window of jQuery. I'd have many event listeners and do ajax things when appropriate, hitting API endpoints I made. That is all well and good, and honestly for simpler information sites that is probably appropriate. However when you start needing templates to insert returned data into, and are trying to push more application logic onto the clients browser, it quickly gets messy.

There are many front end JS frameworks out there, but like always I tend towards lean and extendable. I've started playing with mithriljs. I fully admit it was the name that attracted me to it. I am still taking baby steps, but so far I'm liking it.

I paused on working with mithriljs to brush up on my JS skills, since some of what mithril is doing is more than the simple JS I'm used to dealing with. I started reading through the O'Reilly book JavaScript, the Definitive Guide. Around 80% of what I come across I already know, but then I hit some element I'd never used before, or learn some nuance I wasn't aware of. It's awesome!

Anyway, I am going to try to journal my progress and share neat things I've learned. Stay tuned!