Video of the Week: Elijah Manor–JavaScript Code Smells
Recently, someone who’ll remain nameless, but who holds something of an engineering leadership role at a high-profile financial institution in Australia, said to me “It’s not like this is rocket science. It’s only JavaScript”.
This is someone who works with JavaScript day to day. But this attitude has somewhat overshadowed the language since its inception. Partly, it’s that word “script”, and the marginal place scripting has traditionally had in the computing world. Partly it’s because for a long time, the Web has been seen as primarily a communications medium, not a computing platform.
Associated with this is that we’ve often built things for the Web in “quick and dirty” ways, rather than taking the time to engineer them properly. Perhaps that approach made sense when the Web was primarily “owned” by marketing and communications teams, and what we built was more campaign (made to do a specific communications job for a limited period of time) than product focussed (built to deliver ongoing value for users and the organisation).
But times have certainly changed, and the sort of challenges software engineers have long faced with traditional software systems are our problem on the Web, too. So, a more engineering mindset and approach has been something of a focus at Web Directions for some time now, particularly with our conference Code. And this week’s Video of the Week, from last year’s Code is a perfect and incredibly useful example of this. In it, Elijah Manor talks about JavaScript “code smells” – those often common patterns or approaches that can, in the words of Martin Fowler – who coined the term, indicate “deeper problem[s] in the system”[1].
Elijah takes this idea and applies it specifically to JavaScript. I found this one of the most useful sessions we’ve had at one of our conferences for a long time, and really recommend it.
In fact, I found it so valuable much that this year at Code, we’ll have a session on CSS Code Smells, from Fiona Chan. If you want to be a better Front End Engineer, you should definitely get along. This year Code is coming to both Sydney and Melbourne.
Notes
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