I’ve reinvented myself a few times throughout my career and it’s that time again. Over the next four months, I’ll be working as a full-time front end developer. My last hardcore project involving JavaScript was 5 years ago when I wrote around 2000 lines of vanilla JavaScript and jQuery at an insurance company. To be honest with myself, I wrote that code without actually knowing how to code in JavaScript. It was something that needed to be done and I got it done, as simple as that. As the years passed, the only occasions where I dabbled with front end technologies were when I needed to do minor work on my blog.
Although I’ve been keeping tabs on the state of the art in front end technologies, my hands-on experience is extremely limited. Recently at work, we had a front end project delivered by a contractor that was sub par, to say the least. It was an AngularJS app that was fundamentally broken and I had to step in and fix it as best I could in a very short period of time in order to meet project deadlines. In the process, I got slightly acquainted with AngularJS, but just enough to fix the plumbing in the project. I’m now diving into different frameworks and tools (Node.js, npm, Angular, Webpack, etc.) to implement a fully fledged web application. Above all, I’ll try to make the most of the opportunity and learn proper JavaScript and TypeScript, just like my last project allowed me to significantly deepen my knowledge of Python.