De-jQuerification of Open Mic Finder

Let us mark this momentus event: Today I finished stripping all uses of the jQuery library from my long-running side-project Open Mic Finder! Replacing hundreds of uses of $(".item") with document.querySelectorAll(".item") it was a satisfying cull, tinged with a hint of sadness.

I remember so fondly, those special years circa 2013. My fellow veterans of the browser wars were still so young back then, but oh so tired from the defeat and still coming to terms with losing Flash at the battle of Apple iPad.

The device landscape was a wild frontier of competing standards amongst a land-grab by giants for control of the window through which we live our lives. It was hell trying to build a website that users could interact with in even the most basic way that would actually behave consistently across all the competing versions of Safari, Chrome, Opera, Firefox and Internet Explorer.

Then, over the horizon a shining beacon of hope. This unifying force for good, a tool that allowed us to write our logic once and trust this collection of helper functions to handle all the inconsistencies.... jQuery!

Looking back

At one point jQuery even had a conference! I attended it with my colleagues and wrote a blog post about it... jQuery UK Oxford 2015

Today it is hard to comprehend how important jQuery was for developers building frontends a decade ago, especially since today it's name seems to have become a joke, a marker of a neglected legacy codebase. These days, if it's ever spotted on screen during a demo, someone will poke fun in the chat and others will join in with laugher emojis.

I do remember when jQuery's popularity started to be it's downfall. There was a backlash on StackOverflow against people answering pure JavaScript questions with solutions that used jQuery. A lot of developers seemed to be automatically using it even when it offered no advantage. A generation had never known native JavaScript without it. There was even a joke "How a frontend developer solves fizz buzz... Step 1: Install jQuery".

The jokes stuck. Google's V8 made JavaScript consistent, Node transitioned JavaScript into a backend language forcing it to grow up, the browsers standardised and jQuery's fate was sealed.

To those who maintained jQuery and the CDNs that hosted it, I thank you for your public service.