I don't have time to learn React - Keith Cirkel

I've been building websites for over twenty years now. I started freelancing in the very early 2000s as a teenager, building websites using XHTML, CSS and PHP. That's a long time. (Not that it's a contest; know many people who predate my experience and many who are far more accomplished given less time). It's a long time doing a thing. It's a lot of time honing a craft. Maybe I'll be doing it another 20 years, maybe more, hopefully less, but it's probably reasonable to say I'm half way through my career at this point. I haven't touched a PHP file since about 2012. Last week I was interviewing a candidate who chose to use PHP for their coding assessment, it was unrecognisable from the PHP I had written in the 2000s. That's probably a good thing but it got me thinking about the technologies I've learned and forgotten; what created foundations for my career vs those that came and went without much impact. It also makes me think about how I can spend my time making the most of the rest of my career.

2011 to 2017 was my "consultancy" period, working to instill more maturity in teams around their front-end practices such as introducing them to Unit Testing. During this time I became a core maintainer of Chai, one of the most popular JavaScript assertion libraries in the ecosystem. Despite new tools arriving such as Jest, @web/test-runner, and the built-ins provided by Deno and Node I still find the core puzzle pieces are the same. Maintaining Chai gave me a deep understanding of JavaScript internals, but also in how to test code and what to look out for. It taught me about failure modes, boundaries, and invariants. The time spent was valuable to my career, improving it as a whole. The experience was transferable and proliferated through to other projects.

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