When I first looked into Mithril’s codebase, I had a vague idea of what the virtual DOM was.

One of the major benefits of reading source code is the number of things you can learn. My first introduction to reading code was via Mithril’s hyperscript function.

In this post, I will share some of the ways you can take your favorite library or framework and use it as an educational tool. Since then, my knowledge of JavaScript - and programming in general - has been greatly helped by the hours I have spent digging deep into the guts of the libraries I use daily either at work or in my own projects.

My understanding grew when I began investigating our chosen framework, Mithril, in greater depth. As I was very much a beginner (I had just switched from journalism to web development), I remember feeling intimidated by the complexity of each framework and not understanding how each one worked. At the beginning of the rewrite, we had spent time investigating a number of different solutions including Mithril, Inferno, Angular, React, Aurelia, Vue, and Polymer. We had just finished rewriting an internal legacy framework we used to create e-learning courses. He also uses Redux to demonstrate how he approaches breaking down a library.ĭo you remember the first time you dug deep into the source code of a library or framework you use frequently? For me, that moment came during my first job as a frontend developer three years ago. In this article, Carl Mungazi shares how he got over his fear and began using source code to improve his knowledge and skills. When you are still early on in your programming career, digging into the source code of open source libraries and frameworks can be a daunting endeavor.

Javascript source code