Dmitri Gaskin on jQuery (2008)
5 points by janus
5 points by janus
The fact that jQuery falls into retrocomputing category (and rightly so, this talk is from 2008) is oddly existential.
Agreed with your overall point, but I actually don't think anything to do with jQuery would fit in the Lobsters retrocomputing tag definition. (I haven't watched the talk yet.)
Still oddly existential.
I remember back when I was involved in web engines and standard a reasonable large amount of pressure to include jQuery as a standardized part of browsers, because obviously its popularity demonstrated that that was necessary.
It was really annoying to explain that it was just another web framework that would likely not exist for ever, and it repeated a bunch of the "guess the correct action from the argument" mistakes of many of the early web specs. Now there are enough competing frameworks to make such nonsense infeasible. Unfortunately the general "react" pressure is annoying, especially given react largely translates into "increase memory by duplicating everything the browser engines already cache, and try to cache layout changes ... that the browsers do a better job at caching". Sigh. (seriously the number of performance problems boil down to dumb react frameworks bulk changing css properties in a way that actively undermines all of the caching browsers have decades of work optimizing)
I was curious what that 12 year old (who's now ~30) has been up to since then. Looks like these days, in between various tech jobs, he's an accordion player "specializing in klezmer and Polish and Romanian folk music"! https://cupresents.org/artist-details/1281/dmitri-gaskin
His LinkedIn says "Accordionist, Farmer, Engineering Leader" so I'm pretty sure that's the same Dmitri Gaskin. He's also worked at Mapbox and Branch Metrics (which he co-founded). These days he has a small goat farm.
Yep, I worked with him at Mapbox and before that, we ran in the same circles around the time of this video.