Yesterday I presented ’Death to jQuery’ at Pandamonium, our internal Tech Conference at Instructure, because honestly it’s time.

jQuery was critical to the development of the web, it is the reason that most of us have jobs honestly. We would never have been able to build the web as we know it today without it. But, now... it’s time to move on.

The DOM APIs have standardized, with fetch, and the prevalence of stream based APIs generally dealing with AJAX is pretty easy cross browser in which ever flavor of API you choose. The power of the web as a platform is greater then it ever has been.

On top of that add in data driven UI layers like React and using jQuery begins to run counter to the very way we structure our applications. It is, at least in react, an anti-pattern that points to either a lack of understanding or a place that is going to be problematic for the duration of the project.

Whatever you think about jQuery the slides are at least interesting... and making the randomly generated backgrounds was really fun. Might have to write about that later.

Check them out!