PROFILE

John Resig
Origins of the JavaScript Ninja
BY MICHAEL BERNS TEIN

DOI: 10.1145/1836543.1836557

You shouldn’t develop anything that doesn’t scratch your own itch,” John Resig, the creator of the jQuery library, reflects. jQuery has clearly scratched John Resig’s itch, and those of a few others, including Google, Amazon, IBM, Microsoft, Twitter, and Mozilla.

Resig created jQuery in 2006 to make his own web development easier. Since then, the open-source JavaScript library has spiraled into one of the most popular web front-end resource in use today. It’s fast, simple, extensible, and provides a conceptually consistent wrapper around the spaghetti of mutually incompatible APIs that constitute today’s JavaScript programming environment.

Resig’s itch that led to jQuery began while he was a student at Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT). “It was incredibly frustrating to try and build a front-end application that would just work,” he says. He began making life easier for himself by writing two independent pieces of software: a CSS class selector and an animation library. Those two projects meged together to become the first release of jQuery. Resig then turned his attention to cross-browser compatibility, and the project flew onward and upward from there.

Most programming systems get to the point that they satisfy the original author and subsequently stop evolving. Not so with jQuery. jQuery has succeeded directly because it has embraced its community. Resig explains, “The best way to do well is to listen. To communicate. To understand what it is that people need, and be more than willing to adapt.”

jQuery’s second major conceptual growth phase was when John ceased being its only user group. “I’ve made a number of changes in jQuery over the years that at first I didn’t agree with. But I sat down and talked to the people

making the suggestions, and eventually
understood where they were coming
from. That’s way harder than any code
you’d write.”
This is Resig’s uncomfortable
truth of a successful programming
system: success soon becomes more
about non-code than about code. “The
documentation, the community, the
communication is effectively what it boils
down to.” Resig got this situation right

The creator of
jQuery talks about
research, open
source development
and creating the
most popular
JavaScript library in
use today.

early on, surrounding himself with people that, as he puts it, were much better at these things than he was. Even today, only around four of the 20 people on the jQuery team work on the core codebase. Rather than focusing on making jQuery bigger, the team makes it better.

“You want to solve everyone’s
problem, but you have to hold back. If
you overextend yourself, it becomes
way too challenging to maintain what
you have,” he says. “Unfortunately, one
thing that we’ve learned is that any time
you add features, you also add bugs and
documentation.”
Resig attributes much of his
success to values he absorbed in
his undergraduate dorm at RIT. He
participated in a weekly R&D club, where
members of the dorm would showcase
projects they had been working on in
the past week. This club led to some
standard hallmarks of undergraduate
hacker culture, like a networked soda
machine (because, really, who hasn’t
wanted to script a soda machine?).
“That’s what got me interested in open
source,” Resig says, “that crazy feeling of
building things, iterating, being open. It
was incredibly helpful.”