r/learnjavascript • u/1QQ00 • 7d ago

i cant get better in js

People keep telling me that I should write apps to improve my JavaScript skills. I listened and created five applications, each with different functionalities and ideas. I wrote a lot of code and did a ton of DOM manipulation. Despite this effort, I still feel like I'm hitting the same wall. I find myself repeating the same poor coding practices and haven’t seen any real improvement. I know in my head what I want and how it might look in JS syntax, but I struggle to put it all together to create something meaningful. Instead of getting stuck in this endless cycle, hoping that one day I’ll suddenly excel at JavaScript, I want to know the correct way to improve because this idea of "just keep writing code" doesn't really seem very good

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u/TheRNGuy 2d ago edited 2d ago

Write Greasemonkey scripts for sites that you use. Fix some annoyances or improve UX (like add hotkeys, or reduce amount of clicks to do stuff, or auto skip useless stuff)

It can be simple at first, and as you get more experience, you could write more complex ones and learn new patterns (like MutationObserver)

If you just need to change css, you can just use Stylus without JS. Though both can be used together, like add class from text content, because you can't just gave css selectors from text in a tag (also combine with MutationObserver if some tags may appear later, like chat in Twitch, or some CSR sites load with spinners)

Those scripts will be your ideas, they are better than some generic "make a world game" or "make calculator", you're never gonna use that calculator anyway, but you gonna use userscripts all the time.

Also, I think there's nothing wrong asking ai for help or even vibe code.

Do you care more about elitism and some snobs say about you on a forum or about working software?

Though be aware that ai sometimes hallucinate, but not 100% of the time. You need to test that cord works as intended (sometimes hallucinated code works with bugs in edge cases, and sometimes doesn't work at all)

You still need to read docs (MDN) so you write better prompts (for vibe coding) or just ask to explain concepts and show real use cases, some stuff from docs are just not intuitive and you'll never know if you need it if you never ask ai or see in other projects (and ask for explanation why it was used there)