I’ve been doing JavaScript for some time now, and like a lot of us, until a few years ago, it was mostly limited to jQuery … Till I watched this podcast of Paul Irish where he takes the source code of jQuery (1.4.2 :D) and breaks it down explaining things like closures, IIFEs, module pattern …
That’s when I realised I wasn’t writing JavaScript at all but jQuery and I chose to really learn the language. At that time, I was mainly developing in php (Zend framework) / MySQL & jQuery.
I really enjoyed discovering this whole new part of JavaScript. I remember giving a talk to the developers in my company about JavaScript (I did some livecoding of a plugin in jQuery, explaining every bits of the code). My co-workers were always teasing me about how JavaScript was not even a real language, that it had no concepts of inheritence or object oriented programming and that I was insane to waste my own time learning it …
But then, NodeJS came along … and some other cool stuffs …
I eventually quit this company (I learned a lot on web development there and met great people, but it was time to change) to work on a full-js job.
Since then, I never stopped learning, experiencing new stuff on personal projects … At some point I started publishing some code on github, posting articles on my blog, answering questions on stackoverflow (giving back to the community) …
For the last three years, I’ve seen a lot of changes within the JavaScript ecosystem. With the new ECMAScript standards and everything, it’s not going to stop. I’ll do my best to keep up to date, not only because I have to but because I enjoy it !
And you, how did you become a JavaScript developer ?…
Tophe
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