This week’s Hero of JavaScript is Vladimir Tribusean! Vladimir is a fellow JavaScripter who is passioned about JS and education in IT. He was a mentor at ”Girls Go IT” project in 2015 and he volunteer in different social projects and activities. Let’s find out more about him!
Can you tell a little about yourself (hobbies, education, interests, etc.)
I am a full time developer that turns a lot of coffee into code on a daily basis, and that code turns into a working application called Retently.
I have graduated Technical University of Moldova, Computer Science. Computers are my passion since I was a child. From the age of 12 - 13 I knew that I want to study computers and programming. My journey started in middle school, when some of my sister’s friends encouraged me to learn something called HTML and gave me a 30+ pages word document with all the basics about HTML. I liked it and started practicing in my free of school time. A few months later, I was given a CSS tutorial to learn, and I liked it as well. I remember my sister went in a trip to Romania and I asked her to buy me a book about CSS. I was very happy to receive that book. But after “mastering” both HTML and CSS, I felt that something is missing… everything seemed to be static and not interesting. This is when I discovered the world of JavaScript.
I wanted to practice my skills in development, but I didn’t have enough opportunities. Therefore, together with a few friends we decided to create a school newspaper. It was called “What’s up?”. I created a website for it in pure HTML, CSS and JavaScript. But then it seemed that even these technologies are not enough for building nice websites. This is how I discovered PHP and MySQL.
It was 11th grade I guess. But after 11th grade I’ve made a pause in learning programming as I’ve got a non-related to IT job at a hotel. However, when I left the job at the hotel, I was already studying Computer Science at the university, so a few months later I’ve got my first job related to IT field, which started my working career as an IT specialist.
Now, programming is my passion and my hobby. And it’s great when your job is both your hobby and passion.
Why did you start using JavaScript?
As I mentioned earlier, in the process of learning to code I noticed that HTML and CSS are not enough to make dynamic websites, so I discovered JavaScript. After this, when I was in my second year at university I’ve got a job as a HTML5/Canvas game developer which means a lot of work with JavaScript, HTML and CSS. I’ve been learning more and more in the process of working, so I loved this programming language. Afterwards I noticed a great dynamic into web applications and I knew that JavaScript is the language of the future. It’s simple, easy to learn and you can do a lot of great things using it. And by the way, now you can write native windows 10 applications using HTML, CSS and JavaScript. Isn’t that cool?! :)
What other programming languages do you know and which is your favorite?
In university I’ve got the opportunity to try on such languages as C, C++, Python, MathLab. I also learned PHP and JavaScript, but still JavaScript is my favourite for now, I know there are a plenty of others I haven’t try yet, but since JavaScript meets all my needs, I don’t see the reason to change on another language (maybe only for personal growth).
What projects are your working on now?
Now I am working at Retently. It’s a startUp founded in Silicon Valley and Chisinau. It has the purpose to help SaaS companies to retain their customers and reduce churn rate by gathering real-time feedback from their customers, so that our clients could understand why their customers are not happy and try to improve themselves. And by the way, our product is written fully in JavaScript both server and client sides.
Which JavaScript libraries are your favorite?
I am not sure I can answer this questions, as there are no favourite libraries for me. It’s just that you have some problems to solve, so you try to find a library that will do that or at least will help you solve your problems. If it’s about rendering libraries I like React.js. If it’s about application state management, I like redux. I also use and like expressjs which is a web framework for nodejs.
Where do you see JavaScript going as a programming language?
Well, I see it going far. Really far. Now we already can write native windows 10 applications using JavaScript. We can write great web applications only with JavaScript as programming language on both server and client side. We already can write almost native mobile applications using such wrappers as Apache Cordova or React Native. So I think in the nearest future mobile companies will smoothly move to JavaScript as native language for creating apps or at least will implement it as a secondary native language.
What advice would you give to people that begin their journeys as JavaScript programmers?
The only things I can say is to never give up and to not hesitate to experiment and fail. So if they fail they will learn something from these failures and will know the solutions the next time they will face a problem. Also JavaScript is developing very fast, so do not wait until all the browsers will support all new features, don’t be afraid to use transpilers as Babel, they are cool, they do not bite and they do a great job. Transpilers are tomorrow’s JavaScript, today.
Is there anything else you’d like to say?
Programming is cool, just give it a chance, try to love it. If you love it you must do programming, and if you don’t, then better do not do programming and do something you will really love and enjoy doing…
