JavaScript Series (01) — Preface. “A Paradigm shift".

How coding used to be done in Javascript until 2016, compared to how it is done now with ES6 onwards, is a paradigm shift. Some posts of this series might be too little too late for the developers who started their careers in the last 5 years. Or others who keep them updated in technologies. Feel free to skip the whole series.

My experience

The last time I worked as a full-scale UI code contributor was in 2009 in a small startup. Even after the restrictions, limitations & vulnerabilities of Javascript, what we did at that time was worth acknowledging.

We created a drag-drop-based completely customizable & persistable UI. The whole UI had a hierarchical structure implementing all OOPs concepts using Prototypal Inheritance, designed according to then-famous Douglas Crockford lectures. However, now all that seems so trivial compared to what ES6 provides out of the box.

Why now, what now

Why am I talking about ES6 almost 6 years late? I do have a (lame) excuse. With the advent of cloud technologies and the era of specializations, In the last 8–9 years I’ve mostly worked only on back-end design & development.

I kept hearing the UI buzz words and had a high-level idea about them, as to not sound like a fool in tech calls, but I never actually got my hands dirty on the new UI technologies.

So a few months ago, I decided to do what most unsuccessful people always do, “Achieve easy goals in a hard way”. The times when you can create & publish a website with just a few clicks, I tried to design and develop mine from scratch without using any libraries. (Except React modules).

While working on this site, I realized how easy things are in current times. So I decided to document some of my javascript experiences in this series. The advancements in CSS are even more mind-boggling, I’ll put a different series for it.

In the next post, we will look at the major features of ES6. Stay tuned.