ITIDO

Regular training is part of our sharing knowledge company culture. This post is dedicated to a JavaScript weekly session with Ivan Ivanov as a lecturer.

Ivan started to work in our team in 2016 as a Software engineer and now he is a Development Team Manager. As a Manager, he is responsible for leading a development team, improving the quality of our service, identifying the most appropriate solutions, and effectively manage the performance of the asset regarding the value, program, cost, and finance.
He believes that the path to success is to improve daily and be a team player.

The weekly training session led by Ivan was about bleeding-edge JS features.

What inspired this lecture in the first place?

The initial drive for this lecture to occur was mainly curiosity. We all carry the codecraft in our hearts and sharing knowledge and learning is part of our daily routine. This leads to better efficiency for each separate project but also builds up the team and the skill set we have. On the other hand, JavaScript is constantly evolving, and (we mean it) there are new frameworks and technologies to investigate, learn and use each day. The key part for this to happen is getting a strong grip on the new features JavaScript (ES2020) presents to us.

Lastly, not everyone of us is a Front-End developer. But getting to know what happens on the other side is crucial for development, based on teamwork.

That’s why we had a look at the new shiny features ES2020 presented.

What was covered?

Almost all of the projects Ivan is involved in these days are involving React.js, Vue.js, or another framework (Angular or Svelte for example). A huge part of this involves using exactly those new shiny features of JavaScript with the help of Babel and Webpack. And we searched, investigated, and covered the most crucial of those in the presentation too.

We went strongly through the specifics of let and const, the template literals, including Unicode support and the quite handy arrow functions. As the team swallowed those without even thinking, there was some backup in place: destructuring objects and arrays, object literals, for-of-loops, spread operators, and more.

But this wasn’t enough still…

In a total of forty-two slides, Ivan managed to put even more content for the most curious, that went from ES9 to the future! We mean things like rest and default parameters we often take for granted in other languages like Python, modules, string extending with padding operations, the new classes (it was deep), and of course the hugely important async and await, web workers, and atomics.

How have we incorporated this knowledge into our work?

To be plain, almost everything. Multiple times! As part of our work with React, Vue, and their variants for mobile development, we grew so used to those, that when having a good old plain HTML, CSS, and JS page to be created, a simple var seems quite strange even. Still, those new practices we obtained, using the new toolkit ES2015+ offers got us thinking. Thinking differently. And this often got us faster to the success stage.

What is next?

The JavaScript world is constantly changing, ever-evolving, and growing. Getting to know the newest parts of the language is not enough and we know it. Next is the JAM stack, that is calling us, but this is for another post.

We always find it worth sharing knowledge and brainstorming as a team!