Editorial: What Do You Want to Learn in 2017?

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Happy New Year, readers of SitePoint JavaScript! I hope everyone has a great holiday (for those on vacation) and is ready to welcome 2017 in a brand new look.

2016 was a crazy year for JavaScript! We have witnessed the increasing popularity of ES6 and the rise of progressive web applications. In addition, Yarn appears as a competitor of npm, and JavaScript fatigue has also become a topic. If you missed this or just wanted to look back on the past year, we're ready for you. Craig Buckler reviews these events and more in his article JavaScript: A Review of 2016. Very worth reading.

Looking forward to 2017, I have two questions. Will this year be as crazy as last year? What should I focus on my study in the next 365 days? The answer to the first question is "almost certain", but the answer to the second question is more complicated. Knowing what to study depends largely on your situation, for example, are you looking for a new job? Do you want to improve your current work efficiency? Or do you want to try some new technologies and see how they compare to the ones you already have?

If you are in the last group, we're ready for you too. Tim Severien reviewed three libraries worth paying attention to in early 2017. I encourage you to read this post and let Tim know if you agree with his choice (spoiler: one of them is Vue.js).

As for me, one of my decision to target for 2017 is to reduce the use of jQuery. This is not because I suddenly joined the anti-jQuery camp. I don't. But because jQuery was so awesome when it first appeared that I often use it inadvertently today. I didn't stop and think about the functionality of the browser itself.

In fact, this jQuery "dieting" works quite well. For example, I recently need to select an element's closest parent element, which is an anchor tag. In jQuery, this is not a problem, you would use $el.closest("a"), but in native JS, I'm not sure. So I visited youmightnotneedjquery.com and entered "closest" as the search term, and there was no result. Well... not ideal.

I tried writing my own solution and came up with this:

while (el.parentNode.tagName !== 'A') {
  el = el.parentNode;
}

It works, but is a little ugly. Then I searched and found that both Firefox and Chrome are natively implemented element.closest(). That's what I need. Get it done!

Obviously, replacing jQuery with experimental browser features is not always feasible. If you are worried about compatibility with older browsers, using jQuery is a wise move. It's not efficient to do something in jQuery in just a few seconds, but it takes a few minutes to search. But even today, the website downloads a lot of KB of JavaScript to do things that have been part of the standard DOM for years. Incorporating this change into the way I work will force me to be more familiar with the capabilities of modern browsers – a goal worth pursuing in 2017.

But what about you? Where will you focus on over the next 365 days? Are you going to learn a new framework (if so, which one)? Will you try Node? Or is your goal to attend a party or contribute to an open source project?

Whatever it is (or not), I want to hear your thoughts in the comments below.

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