The Beauty and Simplistic Complexity of jQuery: A Love Story.

It was week 7 at WDI and JavaScript was still on my mind. How could I have been so naive? So foolish? To think that just two weeks before I was riding the Rails, my first full app dinr was deployed and going strong, no cares in the world...the Internet, my playground. The CRUDiest MVCs could be found rendering my heart's desires for the world to see. RESTful days, led to RESTful nights. It seemed like I could conquer anything, the Internet was mine. 

Then I met her...

Her close friends called her ECMA, but she told me to call her JS. After that day everything changed. Implicit returns? Gone. My dreams turned to nightmares filled with unexpected token errors, NaN violations, schizophrenic variables changing value with reckless abandon.

The solid world that was Ruby had become a metaphysical canvas of fleeting elements, coming and going, passing with each failed callback. I couldn't understand a single word she was saying. We met on the DOM everyday, hoping we might share a moment of understanding. Global variables, prototypes, Objects, nothing made sense. I was losing confidence, doubting myself. It seemed like an insurmountable feat. I knew our potential, but concepts that were a breeze with Ruby seemed completely foreign to me. The libraries of gems that I once played in had become toxic ground overnight. It was better to write out a for loop than try to use Underscore, for loops were comfortable, something we both understood. I was ready to walk away from JS forever, and retreat to the back-end for the rest of my days. But one day JS met me with a puzzling look on her face. Whenever she went to speak I heard faint rumblings of Jerry Maguire..."SHOW ME THE MONEY! SHOW ME THE MONEY!" We were having a breakthrough. My words started to make sense, we started to understand each other. Our most complicated of thoughts seemed to link together and appear in front of my eyes almost magically.

jQuery, or just $ for short, changed everything. She told me that it was all a test. A test of patience, a test of persistence, a test of grit. I had to suffer, before I could truly understand and appreciate the complex beauty. Would jQuery mean as much to me if we hadn't spent all those hours, struggling with our words, wanting so hard to understand each other, but always falling just a little bit short. Now I feel whole again, stronger than ever. Working on my first group project this weekend, jQuery by my side, Rails beneath us. The future looks bright...and full of gifs.