This week’s Hero of JavaScript is Nicolae Gudumac! Nicolae is a fellow JavaScripter who is passioned about JS and digital marketing. Let’s find out more about him!
Can you tell a little about yourself (hobbies, education, interests, etc.)
I am passionate about programming and design. Since the high school, I was very enthusiastic about web design, digital marketing, startups, coding and all that geeky stuff :)
I have graduated Technical University of Moldova, Computer Science and currently working as a CTO at a startup called Planable (planable.io), that I cofounded with my team from Moldova. We are running our startup at Spherik Accelerator and soon we will be gone to Silicon Valley, to grow our startup.
Why did you start using JavaScript?
I started to use JS while writing my bachelor’s thesis as part of my project on building a real-time analytics dashboard for social media platforms and I fell in love with it. I made more small projects using different frameworks as part of my learning journey back then and with all the hype around it, I really started to consider it more and more. I finally I made a bet in my career for it. And since then I have learned a lot and enjoyed it.
What other programming languages do you know and which is your favorite?
I used to code in Python, C and Java (for Android) mainly for university projects, currently my favorite language is JavaScript, due to its widespread adoption.
What projects are you working on now?
Currently, I am focusing entirely on Planable. It’s a platform for real-time collaboration, planning and approvals on social media campaigns for marketers and their clients. We have built it entirely in JavaScript, it is very visual and provides a seamless real-time experience for content collaboration. We released it in Beta a couple of months ago, and received overwhelming positive feedback which motivates us to continue and make Planable a worldwide solution, that solves this problem. I am building Planable on Meteor framework and embracing a microservice architecture. I also do the devops, UI/UX, roadmap, design and management of the development team.
Which JavaScript libraries are your favorite?
I am a big fan of Meteor framework, that provides a great developer experience and has powerful abstractions and tools out of the box. Also the community around Meteor is large and very helpful. It has helped me a lot to develop the prototype of our app fast and launch, embracing Lean startup philosophy. It provides a set of tools and libraries that are coupled together, so you can be productive with it from day one and focus on the product and user market fit, rather than debugging and coupling your stack of technologies. On the front-end side, I am a big fan of React, and I love its component approach for building complex UI for web apps, that is easy to debug and reason about. Also, recently I started learning and adopting GraphQL, a Facebook library now open source, that I believe is gonna be the future data layer of apps.
Where do you see JavaScript going as a programming language?
It’s a great time for JavaScript and JavaScript developers. It was considered before a “toy” bad designed language that used to run in your browser, but now with ES6 and Typescript most of the issues are fixed. These days, JavaScript is in a unique position, it gets more attention than any other programming language. Big names like Facebook and Google are investing a lot of their resources and engineering time to make JavaScript faster and provide solutions around it. Today it’s possible to write your front-end, backend, mobile and desktop apps entirely in JavaScript, so in the future I think it might become that language “to rule them all”.
What advice would you give to people that begin their journeys as JavaScript programmers?
Be flexible and adapt fast. JavaScript is especially challenging to keep up with. Nearly everyday some new libraries are released that usually change or disrupt the way we code our apps. With so many options to choose from and the insane pace of development, usually JS developers suffer from “JavaScript fatigue”. But this dynamic environment and the abundance of tools, libraries, frameworks and packages makes it easy to solve nearly any challenge that you might have in the process of development. Someone, somewhere already wrote a package for that! So you don’t have to reinvent the wheel each time you face a trivial problem.
Is there anything else you’d like to say?
Programming is fun, but gets especially interesting when you are trying to solve real world problems with it. Find what you love in the IT ecosystem and try to work on real world problems, challenges, startups and your motivation will go over the roof.
