Show Javascript Some Love
Friday, April 20, 2018
Hey! I added a light and a dark theme to the page. You can click the bubble next to my name to toggle them. Isn't that awesome!?
Anyway...life is at a really interesting place for me right now. Professionally, I'm developing a lot and doing more interesting work. I'm spending a lot of time programming and trying to up my game. Mainly, that means focusing on Javascript for the time being. I'm pretty competent at developing on the backend using Python, but my frontend skills have been languishing, and fancy frontends are what my clients want (not everyone is pleased by minimalism the way I am).
I've done a lot of work with frameworks - Vue, and more recently React. Frameworks are "easy" (relatively). Read some documentation. Poke around some examples. Build something. But something crept up on me - I spent a lot of time with JS frameworks and libraries, but not a lot of time with JS the language. And eventually, I realized that I needed to go deeper with Javascript in order to take it to the next level.
In the spirit of falling in love with Javascript all over again, I've abandoned frameworks for my own projects. From now on, until I feel awesome, my personal frontend projects will use only HTML, CSS, and Javascript. No libraries...nothing. I've already done several projects this way and surprisingly, it's a lot more fun that I thought it would be. It feels responsive. It feels like the difference between a Miata with a five-speed manual and a fifteen passenger Econoline. I'm loving it.
In the coming weeks, I plan to blog about some of my projects (don't get too excited, they're mostly small, fun things). Stay tuned.
Today's Playlist
Thursday, March 1, 2018
- Dan Terminus - Automated Refrains(album)
- John Frusciante - The Empyrian(album)
- Jesus Lizard - Goat(album)
- Melvins - Houdini(album)
- Kyuss - Welcome to Sky Valley(album)
Abstraction
Wednesday, February 28, 2018
I've been thinking about abstraction a lot recently. Mainly in the context of computer programming, but I view life in a holistic manner so maybe these thoughts apply in other areas.
Generally, an abstraction is made to hide complexity. You might want to build a class that can be reused many times. This is generally seen as a good thing. Abstract all the things - it wouldn't do for us to be rewriting the same code over and over again!
The problem that I seem to be encountering quite a lot though, is when the abstraction tries to do too many things. Maybe there are a lot of similar use cases that resemble each other enough to want to cram them all into one abstraction. It appears like this is a tempatation for a lot of developers, but I feel like it's the wrong way to go. I often times find myself reverse-engineering these abstractions (classes, components, etc) in order to account for new business logic, new customer requests, or new use-cases that just don't fit in the context of the abstraction. It can be quite painful.
In the interest of self-presevervation, I've unlearned a few things. Sometimes, a little bit of boilerplate is a better option. Sometimes, sacrificing two extra lines of code that could be eliminated by an abstraction, for the sake of clarity (and posterity) is a worthy tradeoff. Rather than making my code as reuseable as possible, I now strive to make it as clear and understandable as possible, approaching abstraction cautiously and only implementing new abstractions after I'm certain they're required. A hidden benefit of this approach is that I find myself gaining a much deeper knowlede of the problem at hand before I even attempt to shoehorn it into a class somewhere. This makes my solutions neater and more elegant by the time I'm ready to produce them.
In a nutshell, it's not wrong to be cautious when planning your abstractions (classes, components, etc). It's much easier to implement a new abstraction and switch to using it in your code, than it is to crawl your code and unravel a bad or poorly thought out abstraction and remove it.
Today's Playlist
Thursday, October 19, 2017
- Mastodon - Cold Dark Place(EP)
- Tom Petty - Don't Come Around Here No More
- Tom Petty - Runnin' Down a Dream
- ZZ Top - Gimme All Your Love
- Godflesh - Streetcleaner(LP)
- Baroness - Purple(LP)
- Jesus and Mary Chain - Darklands(LP)
- Isis - Oceanic(LP)
- Devin Townsend Project - Transcendance(LP)