Web Wizardry: JavaScript Essentials – Introduction
“Do your work, and you shall reinforce yourself.”
—RALPH WALDO EMERSON
The following scenario plays out at some point in the career of every developer working on mobile or web apps today:
You show up at your new job (or new freelance gig). You were good enough at using JavaScript that you got hired, and now you’re feeling confident that you can start making contributions quickly.
The HR manager gives you a tour and brings you to your new desk — or maybe you work at home or at your local coffee shop. You log in to your new email account and see a message from your manager:
Welcome to the team! Normally, we’d give you a few weeks to get settled in, but we’re slammed and I’m hoping you can get working on some code right away.
This morning, please log in to Slack and clone our repo, and we’ll get you started on some low-level tasks. A couple of things you should know first are that we use a feature branch workflow, we enforce Google style with ESLint, and we unit-test with Mocha and Chai. Everything is Jamstack with MERN on the back end. The API isn’t fully documented yet, but it’s REST, and you should be able to figure out the endpoints by poking around with Postman. Here are a few small tasks where we could use your help today:
Figure out why the refresh token isn’t getting set in some cases.
Our code splitting is suboptimal. Take a look at the webpack config and see whether you can improve the situation.
Speaking of suboptimal, we have some unnecessary Sass in the login module that may be slowing down our build and load times and should be converted to CSS Modules.
Our ticker widget still relies on jQuery (ha-ha!), and we need to refactor that out before we ship so that we don’t embarrass ourselves.
Okay, that should be enough for today. We have our weekly stand-up tomorrow morning, and we can get you started on something more important then. Don’t hesitate to reach out if you have questions!
Your palms start to sweat as you reread the message. You were told you’d be working with JavaScript. What’s all this stuff? Sass? You know how to deal with unnecessary sass from your dog… .
You grab on to the part about jQuery. You recall reading about it in one of your books, and you’re pretty sure you understand it. But why does the manager think it’s so funny?
You close your email and go to the cafe to order a chai mocha latte and a Jamstack sandwich and have a rest in order to think about whether you really and truly need this job.
