My year in JavaScript review

Hey 2016, you rocked!

In the beginning of 2016 I was in the AngularJS bandwagon. It was all the rage for me as I was looking to learn some JavaScript framework.

AngularJS vs React

The endless battle.

Despite this something was on my mind. I thought I had some solid knowledge in CSS and an atomic-like, modular approach always felt right to me when talking about stylesheets, why not look for something like that for JavaScript? That's when I discovered React Wonderland.

The ability to build real modular and reusable components is something that has a tremendous good effect on our productivity.

Another thing that made me choose React was the fact that the lib itself doesn't have all the things you need to build a web application, and that's good in my opinion as, sometimes, you don't know everything you'll need in the beginning of the project.

Angular comes bundled with all its features and opinions over how you should tackle some problem and sometimes you need to do things in a different way.

Courses

So I took some courses to help me in the process and get to know more people that were going through the same process I was. This was extremely helpful to me about some doubts and concepts I had early on.

Two courses I can't recommend enough are Wes Bos' React for Beginners & Learn Redux. They're good because you can learn the concepts and build a real app during the course. He's also very good while going through ES6/ES2015 concepts so you can learn a lot about that too, but if you want to dig deeper on ES6/ES2015 Wes got you covered with ES6 for Everyone.

Projects

The biggest project I've been working on with React is the new front-end app for AMARO. It's been challenging and rewarding at the same time as we've been using React, Redux and RxJS on a large scale project to build an e-commerce platform.

Another cool thing we've been doing is using a TDD-like approach to develop this app. To accomplish this we're using Jest & Enzyme together.

This project is not live yet as we're approaching the end of development phase. It should go live in Q1/2017 and I can't wait for that.

My advice

That was my year review. Probably it's not the best way for everyone but it was a good way for me as I wanted to become a better JavaScript programmer this year. And looking back to this time last year, I'm pretty sure I was able to make it happen.

If I can give anyone any advice is:

Be open-minded.

It's not because React solves someone else's problem more than it will solve yours. Same goes for Angular and any other JavaScript framework out there.

Be open-minded. We're developers. We know technology moves fast and we need to keep up with it.

It doesn't mean we need to learn all the new frameworks, but we should have an open mind to learn them because we need them in our work or if we want to do so, just for fun.

Note: If you speak portuguese and are interested in React, join us on React Brasil Slack channel.