Legos for web developers

The other day, someone asked me if I ever use libraries like Lodash or Underscore.js, which both have a bunch of helper methods that make working with the web a bit easier.

I don’t.

Loading an entire library for one or two helper functions has always seemed absurd to me. You wouldn’t get the buffet option at a restaurant just for one dish, right?

A lot of the methods in both Lodash and Underscore.js are covered by vanilla JS methods now, and support can be automatically pushed back for those methods using polyfills (I love polyfill.io for this).

I do sometimes poach both of those libraries for helper methods, though. I’ll dig through the source code and pull out the one thing I need, and just include that.

My approach to the front end is a bit like legos for web developers.

I have a bunch of little bricks—snippets, polyfills, helper methods—that I mix and match as needed for the task at hand.

That’s actually how the Vanilla JS Toolkit started out. It was my personal collection of vanilla JS resources, and I decided to put it out on the web in case others might find it useful, too.