JavaScript

JavaScript is the only language that ships in every browser on earth. That fact alone has driven its adoption into places no one intended — servers, mobile apps, desktop applications, embedded systems. It became ubiquitous not because it was designed to be, but because it was already there.

The language has rough edges. Its type coercion rules are famously surprising. Its this binding confused a generation of developers. The async model, once callback-based, passed through promises and landed at async/await, leaving layers of each era behind in every large codebase. And yet it keeps improving. The modern JavaScript of ES6 and beyond is a genuinely expressive language with a mature ecosystem.

I’ve been writing JavaScript since the pre-framework era and through the React revolution. Posts here cover the language itself, the ecosystem around it, and the patterns that make large JavaScript applications maintainable.