Javascript is Fun
- 1 minCurrently I’m working as a full stack developer at AT&T. The backend is in Perl, and the front end is vanilla JS with some jQuery. I also do some work with SQL when I need to update things in our database.
What’s interesting about this is I actually do far more Javascript than anything else, and I really like it! Probably 60% of the code I write is actually in Javascript. I probably do another 30% in Perl, and the last 10% is updating random HTML and CSS files and the occasional SQL query.
I’ve been at my current role ~5 months now and I’ve learned A LOT about Javascript and jQuery. It’s interesting to me that a lot of people really hate them. Maybe I just don’t know any better, but Javascript kind of just seems like any other language to me, and jQuery is just a really big library with good documentation. All languages have their quirks, to be sure, but I personally find Perl’s use of sigils and references more annoying than anything I’ve encountered in Javascript.
That’s not to say I don’t like using Perl, I think its a perfectly fine language. I just feel like every language has annoying parts and I don’t think that Javascript’s are more annoying than anything else.
There are a lot of things that I DO like about Javascript and I suppose more broadly about front end web development. One, being able to use the browser console and developer tools is AWESOME! I can just grab any part of the page I need, inspect the element, then search the code to find where I’m using it and manipulate it with some vanilla JS or jQuery. Am I not sure which of my calls are working? There’s a network tab for that.
It’s been so much fun to learn more Javascript and general front end skills, and I really like how incredibly useful it is. I feel like a much better developer for knowing how to navigate the front end of a project as well as the backend.
Andrew Pierce
Software Engineer based in Durham, NC