After going to a Eugene Web Developers meetup, I decided to pick JavaScript back up again.

But I have a feeling that the current state of the JavaScript doesn’t fit with my personality type.

I’ve worked with JavaScript for a bit back in 2015. It was in AngularJS for the most part. I help build the initial MVP for a startup called capoppy. Was going to be on the founding team, but left the group after a few months. We couldn’t find alignment.

The initial version of Samson, a project I started on my own, was also written in JavaScript.

So after the meetup I was pretty excited about this new thing called React. Facebook is the creators of React. According to Facebook , React is a JavaScript library for building user interfaces.

React is legit. The learning curve is flat. The important API calls fit on one page. You get all the power of JavaScript and its tooling when writing markup, thanks to JSX. If you’re doing server-side rendering in JS right now React should be your pick.

There are plenty of frameworks like Ember and Angular that promise to take care of everything. But using React requires you to make a few more decisions which is where my character flaws started to show.

The landscape of JavaScript changes A LOT. I’m the type of person who’s quick to go down a rabbit holes. With so many changes going on the JavaScript ecosystems is like the wild west. I feel like I’m having JavaScript framework overload.

I can’t put it any better than this post on how it feels to learn JavaScript in 2016. If your head doesn’t spin after reading this then you’re likely ready for JavaScript. I’m just not right now.

The obvious answer is to only use the frameworks that you need. But, trying to learn what you need leads to four frameworks that use five others. It’s pretty difficult to do. The 2016 JavaScript ecosystem just isn’t for me.

It seems like things might be dying down a bit. In a post about State of the Art JavaScript in 2016 , Francois Ward says that lights at the end of the tunnel. That best practices aren’t always changing, and clear winners are starting to emerge.

My next side project might not be in JavaScript but I’m happy that I’ve tasted it just a bit. Maybe in the future I’ll pick it up again.

What’s the last thing you’ve tried that just didn’t fit?