Gratitude journal - dev edition - stimulus

I started gratitude journaling a few months ago, and it feels nice. It feels good to stop for a moment, find something you are grateful for or makes you happy, especially in these precarious times.

So, I decided to start another gratitude journal publically here, this one focused on technology, software and generally things I am grateful as a developer.

I will try to make a post at least once a week. And for now…

..this week I am grateful for Stimulus

I guess many of you know about this little js framework from Basecamp. I have personally seen it first about six months ago thanks to my work at NejŘemeslníci.cz, where our front-end developers started using it some time ago.

As I am not front-end developer myself (I prefer backend, mostly in Python and recently in Ruby on Rails), I only have some little knowledge in js, and when I needed to use some (e.g. for my web app ketocalc), I just wrote some terrible code, which “just worked” (but was terribly unreadable, unmaintainable and added terrible class-naming scheme to my html).

Well, at work I learned some basics of stimulus and it seemed nice. So this weekend I decided to finally improve code in my project, so I stopped being ashamed of it whenever I worked on that project.

I didn’t manage to crack how to use neither npm nor webpack, luckily I can use stimulus without it (I know, I know, it’s not optimal and I promise, I will get there someday). I simplified my code (both js and HTML) immensely, replaced AJAX with fetch, DRYed my code, and got rid of most of jQuery. I am so happy now.

I know that most of it is not because of stimulus. But it helped me with the process of writing nice, reusable code, and I love how it connects to HTML. I think it’s really great js framework, especially for someone not very fond or skilled in frontend.

So, that’s for this weeks gratitude.