If I see the words "vanilla JS" or "SQLite" on a resume, I will automatically place it into my maybe pile.

Is that a good or bad thing?

Yes, its basically a shortcut when I am doing a quick first scan through resumes. The moment I see one of those keywords I will flag it for 2nd pass review and move on.

I'll bring some demos of my snowflake animations and cartoon character gifs that follow the cursor around to the interview

I actually quite like writing vanilla js in my spare time, but I can never tell if I'm doing everything horribly wrong or not

As long as it makes sense when you read it after a few days (i.e. its well organized) and it also works as expected, then you are probably doing well.

Javascript is actually incredibly fast on most devices, especially if you are constraining yourself to the vanilla API and not something like jQuery. Remember, every web browser's JS engine has been hyper-optimized to support decades of half-assed website implementations.

It's really hard to screw up perf on document.getElementById(). There's honestly not a whole lot of ways to hang yourself with the vanilla methods unless you are trying to build something ridiculous like a raytracer or physics engine.

i think the biggest thing for your average app is just causing a lot of layout repaints. as long as you spam requestanimationframe everywhere and group style changes and polling, you'll be good. I was really surprised how good I was able to get things on even an ancient ipad 2 I had laying around

> document.getElementById()

Can we at least do document.querySelector? Pretty please? :-)

Just use the 1 line jQuery:

const $ = document.querySelector.bind(document)

What does it do?

Vanilla JS is pretty cool. Eleventy is even cooler, it gets you most of the things a framework gets you, but gets compiled to fast, vanilla JS and that's what served to the browser.

Svelte/Sapper also has a lot of potential as it only ships the parts if the framework that are absolutely needed instead of the whole thing.

But in reality, you can make plenty of very fast React sites and plenty of slow vanilla JS sites.

Any modern JS Framework gets compiled to vanilla JS. That‘s exactly the problem: Because Browsers don‘t implement ES6+ Syntax natively, it has to get compiled to complicated, long winded ES5 or filled by heavy polyfills. If browsers were all spec compliant, code bundles would be way smaller.

> Because Browsers don‘t implement ES6+ Syntax natively

Erm what? What browsers are you talking about now?

This almost certainly means Internet Explorer, if they’re only referring to ES6. But honestly I love all the feature since then. It’s actually difficult for me to imagine not using TypeScript these days, let alone not having access to asynchronous/await or async iterables, plus all the tiny little syntax improvements it’s easy to take for granted like Array.includes()

Old Android browsers, UC Browser.

Feel free to replace jQuery with regular JavaScript in my post.