DEV Community: Ed Link III

New Job Alert

Ed Link III — Tue, 08 Mar 2022 22:33:46 +0000

I haven't posted on here in quite a while. I've been busting my butt working for a new company. I accepted a "JavaScript Developer" position with a subsidiary of a Fortune 500 company last May and started in mid-June.

("JavaScript Developer" is even a bit of a misnomer... I do spend about 75% of my time doing front-end work, the rest is spent in C# and SQL.)

After looking/applying/interviewing for about four years, I was exhausted, but I was finally starting to get some really solid leads. I was getting hit up by recruiters 10+ times a week on LinkedIn - 20ish years of experience will do that. Usually the jobs were looking for someone with 3+ years experience with React, Angular, and/or Vue, thus making it not a good fit (having spent the previous seven years working with Backbone.js, no one wanted to talk to me beyond that).

Needless to say, it took the perfect position to come around... And it did.

I excel at working with Vanilla JS and I was finally contacted by someone representing a company that wanted someone who was not married to a framework. When they learned I had a history (12+ years) with jQuery, as well as experience with C# and SQL, they offered me more than I was asking for.

I was completely blown away!

Almost nine months later and I haven't really had any sort of formal review, but they keep showing me that they trust me and appreciate me by giving me more responsibilities (aka more projects that I "own").

I had a call earlier today with the lead dev and I was about in tears when he told me about the next "overhaul" project he wants me to work on, AND he wants me to run point on it.

I'm not posting this to brag, but to give hope for those who might feel stuck in their current role... Keep swinging for the fences. Keep tweaking your LinkedIn and your GitHub. Get your resume out there. Eventually you'll find the one, or (as in my case) it will find you.

My First Release: JS Query

Ed Link III — Thu, 30 Apr 2020 19:47:54 +0000

I started tinkering with the concept of replacing jQuery a while back, and I've finally finished it. Not really, I just started making major changes to it and decided I should put out a 1.0 release of it in it's current state. (Luckily, GitHub makes that pretty easy.)

Honestly, it all started with me not wanting to change el.hasClass() to el.classList.contains()!

The most important thing to me in writing this was to make sure it was completely compatible with Vanilla JavaScript:
$q('#my_id').textContext('Hello World')

The second most important thing was to make as many of the calls as possible (and made sense to be) chainable:
el.removeClass('active').addClass('blue')

It is being used in production in one of my current employer's applications. However, I write code for a controlled environment - this library is not exactly IE safe. Personally, I've never tested it to see what all would break (if someone would like to do that and update the docs, cool!), but it is pretty dependent on modern browsers and their ability to use modern JavaScript.

I hope you enjoy playing with it as much as I enjoyed writing it.

So, here it is, for your consideration: JS Query v1.0

Why Not PHP?

Ed Link III — Mon, 20 Apr 2020 15:26:45 +0000

I started tinkering with HTML in 1996. It was simple and I liked that I could make web pages that looked better than 90% of what was available at the time. Back then "Webmaster" was the coveted title. I actually did move into a webmaster role for a while - HTML, a little CSS, and Photoshop - for the company I worked for at the time. It was actually a pretty sweet gig.

After a while, I let it go to take a supervisor position in a different department.

The guy who took over for me was asked to do more with the site and was handed a book on PHP & MySQL. Eventually, they decided they needed a team and I was able to move back to doing web stuff with the stipulation that I learn PHP. So I did!

It was the year 2000 and I bought a copy of PHP & MySQL for Dummies (because I knew nothing of programming languages at the time) and went through it page by page, eventually building a personal blog system (that ran for quite a few years). I was a web developer! I held that position for 13 years, during which I learned jQuery (because JavaScript was weird and required), which landed me the job I have now as a front-end developer.

That unnecessarily long intro brings me back to today... I'm relearning PHP. I was approached about an opening in another company doing PHP development a few months ago, so I started looking at it again.

I am really having fun relearning it (and learning a lot of other stuff along the way). Did I get the other job? No. No one wants a 6+ years rusty developer. Am I okay with that? Sure. Am I still playing with PHP in my spare time? Oh yeah!

I am building exactly what the world needs - another social networking site. I am building it with the mini framework I built as part of Brad Traversy's Udemy course (TraversyMVC) and Vanilla JavaScript.

It's so nice to have a project I'm excited about working on.

I've read a lot of terrible things about PHP, although most of them are quite subjective. I don't know why someone should avoid PHP... There are still jobs out there and it still powers A LOT of the web. I've studied Java and worked a bit with C#, but I have to say I prefer PHP to them both.

I'm not writing this as an invitation to have you convince me to learn Python or {insert-hot-new-programming-language-here}. I do still plan on spending some quality time digging into Node/Express/MongoDB... Just not this month.

No one knows what the future will hold, so I am entertaining myself during this time of social distancing with a not-as-trendy programming language, getting back to my roots, so to speak. Again, I'm having fun, and there's nothing wrong with learning something marketable that no one else wants to learn anymore. 😎

Refactoring jQuery

Ed Link III — Tue, 14 Jan 2020 15:04:29 +0000

A few months ago I posted Recovering From jQuery about learning Vanilla JavaScript. I have been working on that, but found some of the code a little cumbersome to try to refactor.

I ended up creating a little collection of helpers to simplify the code. Most of these will act as direct replacements for jQuery. Typically all that will be required is changing $() to $q().

This is not a total replacement for jQuery. However, it was enough to get rid of 95% of my jQuery dependence. I honestly prefer addClass() to classList.add().

js-query on GitHub

There are a lot of jQuery methods I could add (and probably will), but these are the bulk of what was being used in the project I'm working on now.

Please don't rake me over the coals too bad for the ajax() function, remember, I was trying to replace $.ajax().

Doing To-Dos

Ed Link III — Mon, 02 Sep 2019 23:44:10 +0000

I needed to get some code on GitHub, because you apparently can't get a web dev job without it anymore. But I had never used Git (we still use SVN where I currently work). And I had never even tried to write code for public consumption (other than a couple of little projects on CodePen).

So, to learn Git (and have some code to put on GitHub), I decided create a "to-do" app. (I know, real original.) I also decided that, upon completing it, I would duplicate it using different libraries and frameworks I know (eg, jQuery) and/or have been learning (eg, React).

It (the Vanilla JS version) is finished (for now). Of course, these apps are not very complex (nor exciting), but it is something simple I can at least get started with. I even added a context menu (right-click) to give it a little pizzazz.

So here it is in all it's splendor:
https://github.com/edlinkiii/todo-vanilla-js
https://codepen.io/edlinkiii/full/VwZzyZG

In the (very near) future this project will be converted to an implementation using web components. I will also do a version of it using jQuery (and probably Backbone) before starting on React/Redux. Converting one or more of them to TypeScript is also a possibility. (A version with Angular will be inevitable.)

At some point I will likely create my own Node/Express/MongoDB backend also.

Every time I start thinking of what to do next, I end up spiraling in ideas... And it's just a little to-do app. Simple or not, I'm hoping it will display some of what I have learned, because the bottom line is that I really need to get some code visible.

PS: I'm super nervous about publishing this and opening my code up to public ridicule. (Please be kind.)

Work Coding Is Boring!

Ed Link III — Sat, 03 Aug 2019 03:11:02 +0000

My son sees me working from home from time-to-time. I sit there at my desk writing lines of code, mostly pretty mundane stuff like web forms. I can admit that there's nothing particularly exciting about it. But I showed my son what I was working on and he totally got turned off. I get that, but it still kinda hurt.

So, when I finally had a little down time, I decided to write something a little more interesting to him. What guy doesn't want to impress his kid?

I did a little planning and started attacking a "Tic-Tac-Toe" game - using only Vanilla JavaScript. It turned out pretty well, if I do say so myself.

It has logic and does what it is supposed to do. But I wanted a little more of a challenge... Something more interactive. A "Simon Says!" game seemed perfect for this. Once again, only using Vanilla JS.

There's a lot more I could do with these games, but if I do, it will be much later. (This stuff doesn't pay the bills, folks.) Either way, I had fun and my boy got to see that I am capable of more than "boring" work projects.

What have you done to impress your kids using your day job skills?

Recovering From jQuery

Ed Link III — Thu, 06 Jun 2019 16:02:01 +0000

I started learning jQuery more than 10 years ago. I needed to implement Ajax and make pages more dynamic - or so my boss regurgitated at meeting one day. I had been toying with HTML since the stone age (1996) and started learning PHP/MySQL because our simple site just had to have it.

But JavaScript? Really? I hated it! I tried to get some stuff done with it during the IE 4/Netscape 4 browser wars, but it was not easy and I really didn't want to mess with it. Ever.

I found the simplest setup for an Ajax call I could find (roughly 20 lines of code, I think) and started making requests to PHP. I had PHP render all the HTML which I passed back and dumped via .innerHTML... Ah, the good ol' days. (lol)

A lot has changed since then, primarily finding and learning jQuery -- which led to me landing my current position.

Little did I know I was walking into a hornets' nest with this Backbone.js/jQuery project. It had already been in production for a year or two and I was told to never, ever, under any circumstance, update any of the existing libraries, especially jQuery (because, in the past, everything broke).

That was all well and good, until a client ran a scan for vulnerabilities on our system. Oops! I was now told jQuery (1.7 at the time) had to be updated, as well as any and all libraries that could be updated. This, ladies and gentlemen, was not fun.

I had already started playing around with React and was looking at Angular. I saw that jQuery wasn't really something people were (intentionally) working with these days, that plain old JavaScript was better (and easier to use) than it used to be!

Now that all of our libraries have been updated and our potential client is our actual client, I have decided to refactor as much/many of our views as I can without the use of jQuery. I started out just using some arrow functions, changing var to let||const, changing $ to document.querySelector, and .html() to .innerHTML. I'm currently writing mini-libraries to replace jQuery UI (among others).

I am learning so much doing things this way. (The first thing I learned was that I didn't know JavaScript, I just knew jQuery.)

However, I'd be remiss to not leave you with some of the resources that have really been helping me:

I would love to see what resources/methods others have incorporated to make this change. Please comment with your story/path/whatever!

*Please don't bother commenting with rants about not upgrading earlier.

Check out Refactoring jQuery to continue this journey with me.

Simplified Redux w/ a Dash of Vanilla

Ed Link III — Fri, 24 May 2019 12:11:39 +0000

I was gratified by the response my post got yesterday entitled I Just Didn't Get Redux! So I decided to do a follow-up including a link to a new Pen that used the exact same Redux code, but I gave it a UI incorporating some simple HTML and CSS with a little plain old vanilla JavaScript. (I also added the limitation of being between zero and ten.)

It is a super simple implementation (not to mention overkill, using state management for a simple counter), but it's got a little more meat to it than just directly making dispatch calls.

Again, my reason for doing this is that I needed to pull Redux out of the context of React-Redux (which was what I had been learning from the tutorials I was using) so I could understand it, which I was finally able to do.

Also, I want to thank @markerikson for adding a few links to some fantastic resources in the comments of my previous post --> go check those out.

I Just Didn't Get Redux!

Ed Link III — Thu, 23 May 2019 14:30:20 +0000

On my journey of learning React, I was moving along nicely. It made sense to me. But after a while I kept running into a problem while I was following along, watching others write code in videos: Redux.

I tried. Really, I did. I did tutorials on YouTube. I did courses on Udemy. I tried to make sense out of what others were posting in forums and blogs... But I just didn't get Redux. I had a decent concept of what it did but I couldn't figure out how it did it.

Finally, I found FreeCodeCamp. I did the JavaScript algorithm stuff first, then went back and did the Responsive Web curriculum. When I got to Front End Libraries, I was breezing through it as well (I have been doing this for a while, don't feel bad if this wasn't the case for you) until I hit the Redux portion.

I was actually reading everything. Word. For. Word.

And then, lo and behold, the lights came on. I could see it. I had everything laid out before me in a single file and I could actually follow the logic of what all the pieces did and how they interacted. (I still don't know why I didn't think of that before...)

Let me stop for a minute and say, for the record, that I love the videos I watched and the courses I took. The majority of the instructors are super knowledgeable in these topics. But the problem I had was they were splitting the Redux code up into different files (which is proper to do) in a way that made it nigh impossible to put it together in my mind.

Why were they like that? The instructors were teaching React-Redux. They taught me how to use connect() to "wire-up" my React component to a Redux store. Which was awesome. But still left me confused.

I honestly don't think I ever even took into consideration that Redux was a thing on its own.

So, I created this Simple Redux Example on CodePen for anyone wanting to tinker with Redux as a stand-alone library.

Update:
Follow-up post available here.