Read JavaScript and TypeScript lessons from production

Learning from tutorials is great! You follow some steps, learn a smol lesson, and feel like you got this. Then you go into an interview, get a question from the boss, or encounter a new situation and o-oh.

Shit, how does this work again? 馃槄

That's the problem with tutorials. They're not how the world works. Real software is a mess. A best-effort pile of duct tape and chewing gum. You need deep understanding, not recipes.

I took a bet on JavaScript in 2005 when it was known as DHTML. It's been my favorite language ever since. These essays are the good stuff you can't learn from a tutorial.

Leave your email and get the JavaScript Essays series - a series of curated essays and experiments on modern JavaScript. Lessons and insights learned from practice building production software.

Latest JavaScript articles from Swizec

11 articles from 2011 show all

December 2011

Learning me a Haskell

A lesson about client-side templating

Javascript's lack of strftime

Fun javascript feature

November 2011

Parsing JavaScript with JavaScript

October 2011

Firefox's "funny" css3 image scaling quirk

Functional isn't always better

September 2011

So how many readers _actually_ read a blog post?

August 2011

I learned two things today 11.8.

May 2011

node-unshortener can unshort any url

April 2011

A cool JavaScript property you never noticed

A few years ago I was playing around with JavaScript trying to find the cleanest way to implement callbacks in functions. Primarily I wanted a readable way to make certain the last argument passed is a callback, withut having to rely on knowing how many arguments there are and so on. Instead I stumbled upon a pretty cool feature of how javascript handles function arguments.