I'm betting on JavaScript

I wrote my first line of code about 13 years ago at the age of 13. I proceeded to develop and use this skill throughout high school, building websites for local businesses, starting a tech blog, starting a conert promotion business, and more. After graduating, I started an agency, where we primarily built WordPress-powered websites.

Throughout all this time, my exposure to building "apps" was almost non-existent. Most of the sites I built for small businesses just needed a little jQuery here and there. But as my agency grew, we started to take on more complex projects, with the biggest project we took on being a year long Rails and React application. Even still, I didn't work on this project much myself so exposure to building apps was still fairly limited.

That project ended three years ago. At the same time, I took inventory of what I really wanted the next phase of my career to look like. I weighed the projects I had been exposed to, the different clients I had interacted with, and the different companies out there that I admired. The little exposure I had to building applications was really exciting to me, and as an entrepreneur the thought of having the ability to build any idea I had was very attractive, so I set out to learn all the things I needed to in order to have this kind of power. I weighed the different technologies I had been exposed to in order to decide what I should learn deeply, and I made a decision.

I chose JavaScript.

I realized with JavaScript, I could make pretty much any kind of application I wanted to — I could build web apps, mobile apps, desktop apps, and more. Hell, I could build VR experiences if I wanted to. Node made it possible for me to make powerful APIs. React made it possible for me to build rich frontend experiences. React Native would make it possible for me to build apps for iOS and Android. Electron could be used to build a desktop app.

This was very exciting to me.

And three years later, it's still very exciting to me. I'm still learning more and going deeper with JavaScript every day, but the amount of opportunity it has given me to make a living and turn ideas into reality over these past few years is incredibly empowering.

I've been betting my career on JavaScript. And I will continue to do so for the foreseeable future.