The Big Vanilla 3 (JS,CSS,HTML)
Published: 12/9/2021
We go an email the other day that served as notice of potential notice to return to work early next year. Entirely unrelatedly🙄,I’ve been looking at job postings lately. I’m honestly pretty happy with what I’m seeing.
I’ve been trying to break into programming for a very long time – since 2009! I’ll admit, the tries have been half-hearted. In the interest of keeping a roof over my head, I’ve opted to take various roles in other IT fields.
This time feels different. I’m looking at these job postings and think, yeah, I kinda-sorta have those skills. I’m within spitting distance anyway 😅
Preparing to Interview
For the last year, I’ve been learning JavaScript via learning frameworks. I’ve spent time in Gatsby, NextJS, Astro, & SvelteKit. It’s clear that with the exception of React, these have been too far out on the cutting edge for most jobs. It’s time to reel it back in 🎣.
For at least the next month, it’s the bread and water of vanilla JS for me. I’m retaking Wes’ JavaScript 30in30, which I’m still very impressed with. I’m quite pleased how much I’ve learned since the last time I took some of these classes. I can work on them with the video paused, for starters! There’s still plenty to learn.
My first vanilla app
Inspired by Wes’s AJAX look-ahead, I made a little app to look up and display a block of text from the Bible 📖, since that was a free API that caught my eye.
It grew from a little whim to 260 lines of code. Along the way I switched over to Vite so that I could use Typescript. I continue to be very impressed with how Typescript makes me a better programmer. Things like “hey there…that function could return Null you know…what happens to your code if it returns null?”
It does have the effect of bulking the code up a lot both horizontally and vertically, and I can see why if you’re a JS whiz you might resent that. Lean it is not. But it feels worth it to me so far. I still need to go back and see if I can get rid of all of the red squiggles though. TS perfection remains elusive, which might be more the norm than the exception.
Perhaps most gratifyingly, I whipped this up in a day’s worth of work, which makes me feel good. It’s simple, but it works.
Hacker Rank & Algo practice
What I do not expect to be gratifying is working on algorithms…
I know I need to do it though. I aspire to log into HackerRank/LeetCode every day and bang out an algorithm. From what I understand, solving problems like these are de rigeur for technical interviews these days. I need to be ready.