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Chatman R.

I think a lot of us younger developers have a fear of really contributing. We see so many wonderful open source projects moving the web forward and end up a little paralyzed. And since our clients and customers usually don’t care how we got the job done, there’s incredible temptation to apply a quick fix. And it would be so damn easy, too.

Jumping off from what Jordan said, I know there are developers out there who have never worked with vanilla JavaScript and are entirely too dependent on jQuery. Despitte all of the rich resources for learning core language on the web (including the jQuery source itself), developers can get overwhelmed and reach for the nearest framework.

Libraries and frameworks are wonderful. I know devs would have killed to have browser compatibility issues ironed out behind the scenes 15 years ago. I’ve definitely benefited from the rich web education community as a self-taught designer & dev And my endless curiosity makes me dissect every library and framework I use; learning before implementing.

We can argue that the client won’t care about how we solve problems through design and code, but we should. We should totally care if we start defining our skill set by what tools we use rather than the languages they were built upon. With the wealth of resources out there, at what point do we stop developing the web and simply produce it?

I’d like to hear your thoughts on that.