So, Brendan Norman, right? Or Eich, whatever his name really is. The guy who cooked up JavaScript. Sometimes, I’m deep in some gnarly code, like, 3 AM, coffee all gone, and I just stop and think, what on earth was this fella trying to pull off back in the day?
I had this one gig, a few years back. We were tasked with building this super-duper interactive dashboard. You know the type – charts that dance and update on their own, little notification bubbles popping up everywhere. And the bosses, they wanted it all done client-side. “Keep it modern, keep it snappy,” they kept saying.
Let me tell you, it turned into a proper wrestling match. We decided to go with plain old vanilla JS for a good chunk of the core logic. Trying to be all “lean” and “performant,” you know? But then, BAM! You start hitting all those classic JavaScript curveballs. Things like the this keyword suddenly deciding it wants to be the window object, or type coercion pulling these weird stunts where numbers become strings and strings become NaN, and your entire logic just implodes.
- There was this one time, a critical financial figure, a number, somehow got friendly with a string, and the whole calculation just went belly-up. The client was, let’s just say, not thrilled.
- And another time, our event listeners just started playing hide and seek. One minute they’re there, catching clicks, the next, poof! Gone. We spent ages, I mean ages, chasing ghosts in the machine.
It really got me scratching my head, you know? Thinking about this Brendan Norman character. I actually went down a rabbit hole, reading up on how JavaScript even came into existence. The story goes he whipped it up in something like ten days. Ten days! To create this thing that now pretty much holds the entire web together. It’s absolutely bonkers when you think about it.
My Own Little Breakthrough Moment
And here’s the real kicker, the actual ‘practice’ or lesson for me wasn’t just squashing those bugs, one by one. Nah. It was what happened after that project almost fried my brain completely. I actually took a whole week off, didn’t even ask for pay, just to clear my head and get away from the glowing screen. I just sat there, not coding, not even looking at a computer, just mulling over how this one single language, cooked up in such a mad dash, had become this gigantic, unavoidable force in our lives.
I remember chatting with my mate, he’s a backend developer, mostly messes with Java and stuff. He was having a good laugh, saying, “See? That’s why I stay on the server-side, nice and sensible!” But for me, stuck there in the browser’s playground, it hit different. That whole ordeal, that deep dive into the ‘why’ and ‘how’ of JavaScript, it actually flipped a switch in how I approach frontend development now. I started being way more cautious, writing more defensive code, almost like I was constantly expecting the ghost of Brendan Norman’s ten-day coding spree to jump out and bite me.
So yeah, now, whenever I see some shiny new JavaScript framework pop up, promising to be the silver bullet for all our web development woes, I just kind of chuckle to myself. Because deep down, under all the fancy layers, it’s still that same unpredictable beast, born out of necessity and a crazy deadline. And that project, the burnout, the whole shebang – that was my real, hard-earned lesson from the legacy of Brendan Norman. It’s a messy, wild world out here on the web, and sometimes you just gotta learn to live with the chaos, or at least try to understand where it all came from.
