For a long time, tech culture has focused too narrowly on technical skills; this has resulted in a tech community that too often puts companies and code over people. Greater Than Code is a podcast that invites the voices of people who are not heard from enough in tech: women, people of color, trans and/or queer folks, to talk about the human side of software development and technology. Greater Than Code is providing a vital platform for these conversations, and developing new ideas of what it means to be a technologist beyond just the code. Featuring an ongoing panel of racially and gender diverse tech panelists, the majority of podcast guests so far have been women in tech! We’ve covered topics including imposter syndrome, mental illness, sexuality, unconscious bias and social justice. We also have a major focus on skill sets that tech too often devalues, like team-building, hiring, community organizing, mentorship and empathy. Each episode also includes a transcript. We have an active Slack community that members can join by pledging as little as $1 per month via Patreon. (https://www.patreon.com/greaterthancode)
170: The Case for Vanilla JavaScript with Chris Ferdinandi
00:53 - Chris’s Superpower: Derailing conversations and having a knack for taking complex tasks and breaking them down into smaller, simpler parts that people find easy to understand.
01:44 - The Pitch for Vanilla JavaScript
03:06 - Peoples’ Biggest Challenge as a Developer
- Having Trouble Keeping Up
- Adding Processes and Tools Make it More Difficult to Get Started
- “The Right Way To Do It”
05:50 - The Problem With The Way We Do Things Today
- Front-End Development
- Back-End Developers Move to Front-End
08:30 - Modern Web Development
- The Use of Frameworks
- Package Managers
- “The Cascade is Bad” - Using More JavaScript
11:42 - A Better Approach To Web Development
- Sometimes Old Is Better
- Don’t Ditch The Old Just Because Something New Came Out
- Embrace The Platform
- Think Smaller And More Modular
- Remember That The Web Is For Everyone
17:15 - CSS and JavaScript
- Web Bloat That Affects The End User
- Accessibility - Being Able To Work On Improvement
- Accessibility Audit On Gutenberg
- Being Too Heavily Focused On One Programming Language
25:05 - The Notion of Development At Scale
- The Google Hiring Process And Frameworks
27:45 - Silos Of Technology
31:10 - Complexity And/Or Simplicity
- Focusing On Quality Over Volume
- Factoring For Growth
37:20 - Advocating For Vanilla JavaScript
- Documentation
- Unexpected Incidentals
44:10 - Gradual Movement Of The Code Base
45:30 - Using The Word “Just”
49:30 - The Concept Of State
52:45 - Use Of Static HTML
53:40 - Do Companies Actually Build For The Web Like This
- Netflix Page Loads With Vanilla JS
- Happy Middle Ground
58:05 - Summation Of Positives Of Vanilla JavaScript
- Ease Of Beginner Developer Onboarding
- Allowing Non-JavaScript Developers To Participate More Meaningfully In Your Process
- Overall Resilience And Performance For The End User
Reflections:
Rein: Pick the thing that reduces your suffering the most.
Jacob: If you are just starting to learn JavaScript, it is ok to not learn a framework immediately. It is also ok to dive into something else and come back to learn vanilla JS. Also, Noel Rappin - Modern Front-End Development for Rails, takes a great approach to using differing technologies and what they can bring to your project.
Chris: Thinking about the instances where it does make sense to use some of these tools as opposed to reasons why you shouldn’t use them. Liked the talk about minimizing your pain.
If you feel like there are too many moving parts to JavaScript, you are not alone, it’s not you, and you’ve totally got this.
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Special Guest: Chris Ferdinandi.