JavaScript

I have been heavily using JavaScript since 2006.

The beginning

I started during the second browser war by writing cross browser compatible JavaScript. Quickly, it became obvious that a library would ease the development process, so I picked Prototype.Js, then jQuery.

This is when I started to read the libraries source code to understand how it worked.

Building pipeline was not a thing, we were concatenating files manually, and compress them, and since NodeJS was not a thing yet, most of the tooling was written in another language.

Despite the lack of tooling, I was already building highly interactive applications, leveraging AJAX, client side template engines, DOM manipulation…

The rise of the frameworks

Early 2011, I started to use Backbone.js, a library that helped me structure single page applications.

As soon as NodeJS was released, I started to play with it, and it quickly became my go-to tool for managing build pipelines.

Despite trying a lot of different libraries and frameworks, I haven’t been convinced that I could reliably use them in production and still be able to maintain the codebase in the forseable future, so I kept using Backbone.js until…

React

When React first came out, I was skeptical. It was breaking my mental model, but I kept reading articles and watching talks about it.

I finally invested some time to try it more extensively end of 2013, and I never looked back.

The last addition to my toolbox is TypeScript, which I started to use in 2018. I like the way it helps being confident when making changes in large codebases.