SitePoint 2017 JavaScript Survey — the Results Are In

This is the editorial from our latest JavaScript newsletter, you can subscribe here.

I’d like to start this newsletter with a massive thank you to everyone who took the time to fill out our survey. You rock! We had a great response and the results turned up some interesting facts about our audience. Here’s a brief summary of the main points.

Of the people that answered:

• 41% described themselves as front-end developers, 28% as full-stack
• 55% described their skill level as intermediate
• 50% consider ES6 to be the future, 39% had heard of it and wanting to find out more
• 75% use some kind of build tooling (be it a module bundler or a task runner)
• 55% want to learn more about languages that compile to JavaScript
• 56% use PHP as another language on a regular basis, only 7% use Ruby
• 55% would like to see more content on application architecture, design patterns etc

For those of you that are interested you can find the full results of questions 1-10 here. Please note that question 11 is not included, as it is a free text question and thus impossible to summarize.

There were a few surprises in there for me, for example that there is such a high interest in compile-to-JS languages, or that such a small percentage of respondents use Ruby (sniff!). There was also a lot of actionable feedback. We’ll be weighing this up in the coming weeks and incorporating it into our content strategy.

Reader Feedback

In the final question we asked readers what we could do better. We got a lot of great comments and rest assured, we read them all. Thank you everyone that took the time and thank you too, to everyone that said we are doing a great job. We appreciate that!

Other people left more actionable comments and I’d like to answer some of them here. Anyone whose comment I haven't addressed, or who has further comments of any kind is welcome to drop us a line.

Here's what people said:

We developers are always worried about our tools and shifts in tech trends (i.e., backing the wrong horse). It would be great to have more pieces aimed at validating our stack-choices. For example, "Is Angular adoption outpacing React in Enterprise?" or "What is the average salary of developers vs JS framework specialty?" or "What are some hot new npm packages we should be aware of?" This sort of analysis brings SitePoint from "nice" to "IMPORTANT". Tutorials and tips are nice but they are everywhere. On the other hand, it's hard to find good analysis to help with business decisions.

Great feedback, thank you, noted. We do actually have an article in the pipeline on useful npm packages, so watch out for that. And we will take the idea of more analytical content on board.

Tutorials should include editors so that we can practice right away

Many of our tutorials have embedded demos for exactly this purpose. For simple client-side demos we use CodePen (example). For more involved code we use services such as Plunkr (example). We also include a GitHub repo with every tutorial so that readers can clone the demo and run it locally.

The small tips that are missing from most of tutorials turn to be the small pieces that prevent newbies like me to understand and follow the articles. Don't skip steps, for smaller they are.

Got it. We can't always cover every aspect of every technology in every tutorial, as we need to pitch our articles at the widest possible audience. When we do skim things for the sake of brevity, we endeavor to link to articles that will help you fill in the gaps. Also, don't forget that there is SitePoint forums — a great place to ask questions if you get stuck.

React for beginners

Sure. We have an up-to-date beginner's tutorial here. What else would you like to see covered?

Please, bring Angular 2+ content (tutorials, courses, articles, etc.). Also, would be interesting to learn about Google Material Design as well as Angular Material implementation. Lastly, would love to learn Ionic 2 framework. Please, please, please :))

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by James Hibbard via SitePoint