Right? A lot of these tools - they either don’t solve problems I don’t have, or there’s no need for me to know them yet.

One of the other reasons you could advocate for vanilla JavaScript first is that – not that these tools ever really go away; there’s still tons of places that build things with Angular. But you can see the cycle of new hotness, where Angular was THE thing. And then React came out, and everybody was like “Oh, forget Angular. React is way better.” And then Vue came out and people like Divya – and even myself; even though I don’t use it, I look at the docs and I’m like “This makes so much more sense.” Or like “Oh, forget React. Vue is better.” Obviously, React still has a pretty dominant place, but you can see Vue’s market share starting to grow and grow and grow…

[ ] If you work primarily with vanilla JavaScript, there’s never this new thing you need to ditch your old thing to learn. I’m just constantly entrenched in the fundamentals and I never have to think about how I have to build the thing I wanna build. Not that I never have to think about how to build it, but I’ve got this foundational knowledge that serves me well across whatever I try to build.

Similarly, this idea of stable technology over the new hotness - the stable stuff is certainly less sexy, but it also potentially has more traction within a working environment. Companies don’t wanna use the new thing, they wanna use the proven thing that they know is going to work for them. These days, Angular or React are good choices because a lot of companies use them, trust them, they’ve been around for a while… And in terms of employment, I have this concept I call “targeted listening”. If there’s a particular job you want – I tell this a lot of times for beginner developers. If you know you wanna work at a certain company, or there’s a type of job you wanna do, talk to people who do that job, look at job descriptions for the kind of roles you want. What sort of skills and technology are they looking for? If you wanna go work somewhere that says they want React experience, to me the no-brainer is to pick React. Dig into that, learn it, and then go interview for the job.

When I was first interviewing for my first web developer role, I was looking in-house at the company I was at, and I talked to the director of UX. I asked very specifically how they were approaching responsive web design, and she told me “Mobile is a fad, and one that I think is almost over. No one wants to do the thing that they built on their phones”, and I literally, immediately just ended the interview and said it wasn’t a good fit, and thanked her for her time and left, because I knew that wasn’t a good fit for me.

I think paying attention to bigger trends in the marketplace rather than just jumping over to the next new thing… Mobile and responsive web design represented a really big shift in the way that the industry worked, whereas a lot of these frameworks are just tools to approach a particular set of problems in a specific way. But what they’re all getting at is a bigger shift in the way that we build things, with state-based UI, and reactive data models, and things of that nature.

So for me, the specific tech choice there is less important, and understanding the shift in the way we do things is more important. I tend to follow some people on Twitter, and by reading blogs, that I think have a pretty good pulse on shifts that are gonna happen in our industry. And when they say something is important to pay attention to, then I tend to pay attention. People like Brad Frost, or Jeremy Keith, Ethan Marcotte, Sara Soueidan they’re my compasses for when I should pay attention to something or not.