Expect everything to change...

When you’re learning any new language, you write code and then you throw it away, and then you write some more. My modern JavaScript education has been a stepladder of tutorials, then a small tractable project during which I compiled a list of questions and problems, then a check-in with my coworkers to get answers and explanations, then more tutorials, then a slightly bigger project, more questions, a check-in — wash, rinse, repeat.

Here’s an incomplete list of some of the workshops and tutorials I’ve run through in this process so far.

1) HOW-TO-NPM — npm is the package manager for JavaScript. Even though I’d typed npm install thousands of times before I started this process, I didn’t know all the things npm does till I completed this interactive workshop. (On several projects I’ve since moved onto using yarn instead of npm, but all the concepts translate.)

2) learnyounode — I decided to focus on server-side JavaScript first because that’s where I’m comfortable, so Node.js it is. Learnyounode is an interactive introduction to Node.js similar in structure to how-to-npm.

3) expressworks — Similar to the previous two workshoppers, Expressworks is an introduction to Express.js, a web framework for Node.js. Express doesn’t get a whole lot of use here at Postlight these days, but it was worth learning as a beginner to get a taste of building a simple webapp.

4) Now it was time to build something real. I found Tomomi Imura’s tutorial on Creating a Slack Command Bot from Scratch with Node.js was just enough Node and Express to put my newfound skills to work. Since I was focusing on backend, building a slash command for Slack was a good place to start because there’s no frontend presentation (Slack does that for you).

5) In the process of building this command, instead of using ngrok or Heroku as recommended in the walkthrough, I experimented with Zeit Now, which is an invaluable tool for anyone building quick, one-off JS apps.

6) Once I started writing Actual Code, I also started to fall down the tooling rabbit hole. Installing Sublime plugins, getting Node versioning right, setting up ESLint using Airbnb’s style guide (Postlight’s preference) — these things slowed me down, but also were worth the initial investment. I’m still in the thick of this; for example, Webpack is still pretty mysterious to me, but this video is a pretty great introduction.

7) At some point JS’s asynchronous execution (specifically, “callback hell”) started to bite me. Promise It Won’t Hurt is another workshopper that teaches you how to write “clean” asynchronous code using Promises, a relatively new JS abstraction for dealing with async execution. Truth be told, Promises almost broke me — they’re a mind-bendy paradigm shift. Thanks to Mariko Kosaka, now I think about them whenever I order a burger.

8) From here I knew enough to get myself into all sorts of trouble, like experiment with Jest for testing, Botkit for more Slack bot fun, and Serverless to really hammer home the value of functional programming. If you don’t know what any of that means, that’s okay. It’s a big world, and we all take our own paths through it.

my thanks to this great post:
https://trackchanges.postlight.com/modern-javascript-for-ancient-web-developers-58e7cae050f9