Recently I built another tool, https://dungeonworldcharacter.com/, as a static site that uses very little JavaScript in comparison with today’s modern goliaths. If you want to see more about that project check out this blog post here. In the retrospective of the project I noted that I would’ve built it differently if I had to do it all over again. I would’ve used progressive enhancement over top of a traditionally server rendered application.

Dungeon World is a popular Tabletop RPG (TTRPG) system that is built on top of the Powered By the Apocalypse system. The game system is not as popular as other games such as Dungeons and Dragons, but is similar in concept. There are less rules to starting with Dungeon World which is what makes it a great starting point for first time TTRPG players.

I have been developing in React for years. Since the transition to hooks I’ve noticed that React has gotten… messy. I am sure if you have been working with React for any amount of time you have seen this too. Functional components that are 1000 lines long. Test that are 99% mocks and windy logic that is impossible to follow. So what is a developer to do in this situation?

My favorite language is JavaScript. I’ve been primarily developing in JavaScript and Node.js for the past five years with little time spent writing in other languages. I feel like I’ve become quite proficient in JavaScript and it’s complex ecosystem for this reason. I’ve wanted to dip my toes into lower level languages for quite a while. I decided to go with C++ because for an extremely short time in my career I wrote C as a Test Engineer, and I had some C++ experience in college around the year 2010. What I remembered of C and C++ was struggling with pointers, memory management, and basic data structures. C++, of course is an older language. It does show it’s age sometimes. But to my surprise what I found instead was a language that had evolved. Pointers were now a breeze. They had many of the popular features I was using in JavaScript. I just had to figure out where to look. I’ll share the secrets I’ve discovered so far so that any other aspiring JavaScript developers can get their feet wet a bit easier in C++.

The average size of a web page has been steadily increasing since the beginning of the internet. Over the last few years, with the creation of package registries and package managers like NPM, Yarn, and Bower, the size of our pages has grown at an unprecedented rate. These technologies allow for incredibly fast iteration and deployment of new features and give you the vast array of outsourced tools that you can make use of on your web application. But they come at a cost.

You don’t need React. This isn’t a joke. I’m not trying to make you use another framework like Angular either. Angular is even bigger and you don’t need it either. The fact is you don’t need a framework at all. I’m just picking on React because it is the most popular and in my opinion has won the Front End library war of adoption. You can just write plain JavaScript. Before you click away please let me explain.