So I’ve already got a bunch of changes I want to make to my last post, but the whole point of this blog is to write new posts about coding and learning new things. The urge to edit-edit-edit and polish is definitely present and strong.

I want to be a competent front-end web dev, and part of that means being comfortable with industry-standard technology. If I review a bunch of job postings, I shouldn’t feel overwhelmed or intimidated by new technologies being listed. Since the industry is moving at such a fast pace in terms of what tools are desireable, I need to work with emerging technologies regularly. Since I’m not doing that at work, I’ve decided to start doing some of that in my free time.

The vague goal here is to “learn modern JS” but that’s a bad goal for a bunch of reasons. Gotta make it more specific. I would like to complete a specific take-home project that a company I was talking with briefly gave me. The project was relatively simple, but overwhelmed me because I was supposed to use React to complete it, and I don’t know how to use React.

To learn React, I think I need to learn ES6 syntax and then learn how to use Browserify or Webpack. I’m going to take a piece-by-piece approach, so I’ll start with ES6. Cody Lindley is a wicked smart dude (Javascript Enlightenment is the best JS book I’ve read), and he’s got this article 5 Steps for Learning React which lists ES6 as a pre-req. He also has this other article 6 Steps for Approaching the Next JS which has a plan of attack for ES6.

My attack plan for learning ES6:

• Get Babel running on my local machine
• Read the articles Lindley lists
• Watch a dang screencast
• Read a dang book (yuck) after reading a chapter of each Simpson’s and Rauschmeyer’s and deciding which is better
• Use modules