JavaScript Everywhere

Foreword

In 1997 I was a junior in high school. A friend and I were goofing around with the web-connected computer in our school library when he showed me that you could click View → Source to see the underlying code of a web page. A few days later, another friend showed me how to publish my own HTML. My mind was blown.

After that, I was hooked. I went around borrowing the bits of the websites I liked to construct my own Franken-site. I spent much of my free time at the pieced-together computer in my family’s dining room tinkering away. I even “wrote” (OK, copied and pasted) my first JavaScript, to implement hover styles on links, which was not yet doable with simple CSS.

And in a turn of events that I’ve come to think of as a nerdy and wholesome version of the film Almost Famous, my homegrown music site gained reasonable popularity. Because of this, I received promotional CDs in the mail and was put on the guest list at concerts. More important to me, however, was that I was sharing my interests with other people around the world. I was a bored suburban teenager, in love with music, and was able to reach people I’d never meet. That was, and still is, such an empowering feeling.

Today, we can build powerful applications using only web technologies, but it can be daunting to get started. APIs are an invisible background that serves up data. View → Source shows concatenated and minified code. Authentication and security are mystifying. Putting all of these things together can be ...