r/javascript

What JavaScript concept took you the longest to actually understand?

For me, it was the difference between understanding closures in theory and actually knowing when and why they were useful.

I feel like JavaScript has a lot of concepts that seem simple at first, but become much more interesting once you understand what is happening underneath.

I'm curious what everyone's "finally clicked" JavaScript concept was.

Closures? The event loop? Prototypes? this? Promises? The weird parts of type coercion?

Would be interesting to hear what other developers struggled with and what finally made it click.

I love finding new devs to follow on GH so I can see what they're building and starring.

Usually I use GitHub Explore and Trending but I've found them to be unreliable, so I've been ranking rising open-source contributors by language from public GH Archive data over a rolling 7-day window. JavaScript is one of the most active streams in there, so a lot of these observations come from watching it.

This is not terribly suprising given the nature of the internet these days but here's what I found:

1. GitHub Trending cycles the same names because it ranks reputation, not recent activity. You scroll trending, recognize half the accounts, and close the tab. The people doing genuinely interesting work this week never show up because the ranking rewards accumulated stars and followers, not what someone actually pushed in the last seven days.

2. Someone's best work is usually buried in a 3-star repo. Skill signals are fragmented across repositories. A developer might have a tool they wrote from scratch sitting at 15 stars while their most-starred repo is just a fork they maintain. Without weighting activity by relevance, you end up following the wrong people and missing the ones actually worth your attention.

3. 200 commits across 15 repos is impossible to evaluate quickly. You open a profile, see a contribution graph and a wall of repos, spend ten minutes trying to figure out if any of it is meaningful, and usually give up. Raw profiles need synthesis that most people just don't have time for.

The core thing I keep coming back to: momentum and reputation are different signals. Ranking by what someone did this week surfaces completely different people than ranking by what they've accumulated over years. The TypeScript dev who just shipped their first real library and the veteran with 40k followers both have value, but they're not the same discovery problem.

How do you find new devs to follow? How do you decide if someone is worth following?