Clint Hill

At work I am doing a lot of JavaScript development. There is an interesting observation to make about this.

I first saw JavaScript in 1998. I wasn’t a real developer then but I was aspiring to be. It started while I was working a pretty weird job as a Education Consultant at IKON Education Services. My job was to talk people into taking Microsoft certification courses at IKON. Strangely I got the job because (at the time) I wanted to be in sales and account management. Looking back I was really … really stupid. Anyways a co-worker was into fantasy football and he knew HTML and a little JavaScript. Almost every day he was changing his profile page to show an image or some funny text. One day I asked him “how do you do that?”

A year later, and after taking some of those courses I was selling, I got a job at a small web development company. My first job there was to develop a game based on the popular board game “MasterMind“. I was told “it would be easiest to develop it all in JavaScript”. The part that I remember the most was thinking that JavaScript was totally wrong for the job because it was only good at swapping out images on mouse-overs. I scoffed at the thought, but continued.

I moved on from that company because I felt I wanted to do “real” development with languages that were “better and stronger” than JavaScript. Slowly but surely along the way I got more and more familiar with JavaScript because everywhere I turned I had to use it in some fashion. I eventually learned it’s inherent powers and ability.

Now I’m in a job where JavaScript is my number one tool. And I know so much more about the language than I did back then.

The observation is that sometimes there are powerful tools at your disposal right in front of you and you don’t know it, because you don’t know the tools.

I used to say “I know JavaScript and have used it”. Now I say “I’m a JavaScript developer”.