Heydon is a freelance design consultant working with organizations like The Paciello Group, Smashing Magazine, Bulb Energy, and The BBC. He specializes in creating accessible components and design systems, and works with Vue, React, and plain JavaScript. He has written three books on inclusive design for the web. The last is a compendium of articles from the popular inclusive-components.design blog.
Heydon`s talk: Plain Wrong?
I love writing JavaScript. The trouble is, so does everyone else. When people aren`t writing JavaScript, they`re usually writing frameworks for writing JavaScript in JavaScript. In fact, most of the JavaScript that`s around these days seems to either be written for, or within, a JavaScript flavor like React, Vue, or Angular. Frameworks make writing your own code faster and more ergonomic, but they do not come without problems. Code written with Framework A depends on the environment Framework A provides in order to work — and this dependency often represents a lot of code to transmit, decompress, parse, and compile. What about "plain" JavaScript? Is it always naïve to think anything worthwhile can still be achieved just writing some straight-up code? It turns out this is a tricky question to answer, but there`s no doubt the little we do as JavaScripters is often done with much more than we need.