Library-less

When I want to learn and grow as a developer,the very first place I go is always documentation. That’s nice if you already know what your doing, but in the case of learning new concepts I do a general search then begin narrowing down. This may start with a wikipedia article and trickle down to a blog post and then to stack overflow or some forum with people’s comments.

This has to be pretty normal, but there is something that I have noticed over the years that doesn’t quite hit home with me. when I look up how to program, most of the time the first response that my eyes rest on say not to program at all.

You may not think you have the same experience, but I think you have. Let’s say you want to know how to implement drag and drop on the web (which I want to write about in the future). You may know that there is an drag and drop HTML API and so you might go right to the MDN docs but say you don’t know or after reading more about it starts to seem like it doesn’t do what you wanted as you fight against the design of it. Well now your back to kind of a general search. Just straight up “drag and drop react”. This immediately leads to code libraries dedicated to this. Ok… and? you may be thinking, but hear my perspective out.

For me I want to learn how to implement this code. My search was not how to orchestrate drag and drop with other peoples code and although this was a general search I can not seem to get past this answer. I want to learn how to implement or create an abstraction wrapping the idea of dragging a UI element on the web with a mouse and a finger. I don’t hate libraries. I don’t hate using them, but here’s my take. I want to learn the underlying principles. The atoms that make it up or the formulas that create the boundaries of it’s laws.

Here’s the thing though I use react I use next so that doesn’t make sense then right, but why does it have to be one or the other. Why can’t I say I’m in learning mode or even deep learning mode and then balance that with shipping things and getting things done.

Some library’s are great and some are worth more investment than they are worth and just in general I really wish there were more sources on how to implement things because right now the best place to learn that stuff is in other peoples source code. That can be so great unless you can’t ground yourself in the fundamentals enough to grasp what is going on.

library-less is my attempt to help others that are in deep learning mode and want to create rather than orchestrate. I’ll break down some things that I learned that ended up being really great additives to the fundamentals of programming.