WordCamp New York JavaScript Workshop

It’s been a good number of years since I last attended a WordCamp New York.  But it holds a warm place in my heart.  My first WordCamp was WordCamp New York 2008 🙂

This year, my good friend, David Parsons, took up the lead organizer role and put on a great WordCamp New York.

From the venue to the speakers, it all went very smooth and had a nice local camp feel.

Reflections From the JavaScript Workshop

My workshop was an adaptation of a similar workshop I have been doing at a number of other camps this year.

However, I learned one important thing this time.

It is important to take the time at the beginning to address who needs to “Learn JavaScript Deeply” from a programmer’s perspective and who just needs to know what it is capable of doing.

I noticed that some people loved learning vanilla JavaScript fundamentals and how to integrate with the WordPress REST API.  However, some people hung around through several hours of the workshop with not really realizing they did not need to learn JavaScript deeply as a developer. Some of these people were just savy website owners.

This supports something I have been saying for a while:

Compared to HTML and CSS, which you can learn a little and do a lot, with JavaScript you have to learn a lot to do a little.

All that said, for folks who wanted to learn JavaScript more deeply (or even just for the first time) I think the workshop went great.

Changes I’m Making for Next Time

There are a few modifications I am going to make for next time though:

• Add a note at the beginning about “Who Should Be Learning JavaScript Deeply” and who can just learn to “Speak JavaScript”
• With the decoupled Vanilla JS and WP REST API practice project we will just use fetch instead of introducing Axios or jQuery.
• Inside of WordPress, when we import our decoupled example into a WordPress theme I am just going to show how to use jQuery AJAX.
• Rather than try to teach the Backbone client I am just going to mention it at the end.  After teaching it for a while, I think it is best to know some Backbone before trying to use this.

You can view the slides and example files from the workshop here.

Learn More JavaScript!

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