Mehran Hatami

I have been around as a JavaScript developer for almost 14 years now, all the way from using prototype.js and dojo, and dealing with all the difficulties when dealing with cross-browser issues in IE6, Opera, Firefox and Safari, to the latest exciting stuff in the JavaScript world, such as jQuery when it was just a newcomer, the early days of MVC becoming popular in the client-side, all the MVW libraries and frameworks, and more importantly the intense evolution of the language itself from ES3 to ES6 and ES7. I consider it as my main area of expertise and passion. Setting up even enterprise NodeJS apps didn't used to seem feasible at first but using the cool stuff like Cluster it has become a definitely reasonable choice to setup a JavaScript full-stack without loosing the chance to use a multi-core system and taking advantage of all the cores.

When Node.js first showed up and became popular it made a huge impact on the web industry and I had the chance to be there at the right time and witness the rise of a new promising platform. As a JavaScript developer now I had the chance to be a Full-Stack developer without having to deal with other programming languages. During the last couple of years I have been involved in numerous Node.js apps using the state of the art frameworks and libraries like MEAN Stack, ExpressJS, Mongoose, Koajs, Ghost and etc. along with technologies like promises, ES6 generators, ES6 module loader and others.

I believe REACT is a crucial part of the evolution of JavaScript as a language but because of its new syntactic offers there has been some resistance in the JavaScript community but I have always considered REACT as a promising JavaScript library for building user interfaces and that's why I have been using it from its very early days. Flux and REACT together offer a really powerful technology stack and I have used it as the main skeleton of my JavaScript applications. I have also used it once along with Backbone which was a really great experience.

I have been involved in 2 different types of projects, the regular way is scaffolding out the whole skeleton and using AngularJS from scratch and the other way is a sort of migration process from the old-fashioned way of web development, using jQuery, KendoUI, ExtJS and etc. to AngularJS. That's how I have got involved mostly helping out the team to pass the learning curve of using AngularJS along side the migration process to AngularJS.

BackboneJS as a lightweight MVC approach has extensively helped the JavaScript community to take the whole SPA solution more seriously. I have been using it from when it got popular in the JavaScript world, I highly recommend using it specially for new-comers in the web development industry.

MarionetteJS is my favorite among all of the MVW solutions out there. I have been involved using it, in 3 different SPA projects. Offering a clean API on top of BackboneJS and providing a powerful routing solution, makes it really special to me. Backbone itself doesn't provide much to deal with advanced layouts specially in enterprise applications, and that's how MarionetteJS makes your life much easier. Great documentation and really readable code is the other plus for MarionetteJS which makes it easily debuggable when needed.

I don't consider myself a graphic designer but I have gone through the whole process whenever I had to cover the role. The point is having a HTML/CSS related expertise doesn't necessary need us as front-end developers, to be a designer, although it has always been part of our dream to be good at design related stuff. Actually, It took around 3 or 4 years for me to become someone who could detect the bad practices in a front-end project, who knows how a good design should look like, and someone who has couple of great designers in the team. Digging into typography, picking the right font, coming up with a great color scheme and so forth, each has its own field of expertise for us as developers to dig in and read about it, that's how I keep up with the latest trending stuff in this domain.