Interview
“On the in-between days, I share my
approach to the project and some common
challenges and ‘gotchas’ that students run
into. There’s also video office hours every
few weeks for people to ask questions.
This is the fifth time I’m running this
programme and it’s the most successful
one yet with the most engaged students.
They help each other out and analyse each
other’s code. It’s my favourite thing: I love
helping people learn.”
Ferdinandi also hosts a podcast
(vanillajspodcast.com) and every weekday
sends out a short email (gomakethings.com/
articles/) with a developer tip or trick, code
snippets, tools, techniques or just
something interesting he found on the
web. The list has grown to more than 7,500
subscribers at the time of writing – a
massive jump from when it was a weekly
newsletter. “Two years ago I had just 38
subscribers and I was struggling to grow
it,” Ferdinandi remembers. “But then a
business coach I was working with
challenged me to write every day, which Ithought was going to be complete madness
at first. I didn’t think I could keep up with
that cadence and that no one would want
to read that many emails from me. But I
came up with 28 ideas for articles in 10
minutes and just started writing. Then this
crazy thing happened: people started
asking questions back, which made it really
easy to write more emails. Within three or
four months the list had grown to a few
hundred people, after a year it was up to
3,000 subscribers and then it doubled again
over the last year. Now I have a back
catalogue of 99 articles I want to write.”
Whatever the learning resource
Ferdinandi is working on (next he’s going
to update some of his pocket guides and
add more self-paced projects), the aim is
always to demonstrate that modern web
development doesn’t need to be complex
and that we’re using too much JavaScript,
which is hurting the web. A simpler, saner
and more resilient method of building
engaging, cutting-edge sites and apps
without all the cruft really is possible.primary tasks. Netflix ripped React out of
their default front-end page load last year
and saw big performance improvements.
They still use React server-side for
templating but initially you get just HTML,
CSS and vanilla JavaScript. As a result their
load time and time-to-interactive
decreased by 50 per cent!”
The Lean Web, also a conference talk, is
a culmination of spending a lot of time
evangelising for the use of vanilla
JavaScript instead of libraries and
frameworks. On top of this, Ferdinandi
writes short pocket guides and creates
video courses covering vanilla JS for
beginners (vanillajsguides.com), puts
together real projects for people to build
for a deeper learning-by-doing dive
(vanillajsprojects.com) and runs a 10-week
online training programme called the
Vanilla JS Academy (vanillajsacademy.com),
designed to help beginners solve problems
and think in JavaScript. “Every other day
you get one or two short lessons followed
by a project to work on,” Ferdinandi says.