Ever viewed the source of a modern web page to see how the designers and developers are doing something in Javascript, then come across the dollar sign ($) all over the place?

The first time I noticed it was already several years ago, and I remember being intimidated, simply because I was not familiar with it and I worried that it was some part of Javascript I had never learned about — some strange syntactical magic or something like that.

I ignored it for a long time.  For me — and, I imagine, for many programmers who started their careers prior to the 21st Century –, Javascript was a side show in which I participated only out of occasional necessity.  When I came across something mysterious, I had no desire to dig deeper.  My attitude was that if other programmers — probably younger — wanted to dabble with such a loser language and get all crafty and mysterious with it, then let them waste their time.

Well, as this blog will frequently show, I’ve dropped that attitude completely.  I now rate Javascript among one of the cool and fun things to talk about on Such Fun Coding.

Several months ago I took the time to get past my fear of that darn dollar sign and learn more about it.  What I learned is that there is nothing magical at all about the dollar sign.

My first Such Fun Coding video is dedicated to sharing that fact with others and explaining precisely what the dollar sign is.

UPDATE: the source code for the slideshow is available at my github account.

The Javascript: Dollar Sign video can also be found at YouTube.

If you’re reading this within the first week or so of me running this site, you’ll know why I threw scare quotes around “Design” — at the moment there’s not really a design to speak of.  I’ll be working on that, but probably slowly.

I’m impressed by the customizability available through the Thesis Theme’s Options screens inside of WordPress Admin, in addition to their custom (syntax-highlighted!) file editor for programming some more advanced customization.  I’ve yet to use Thesis on a blog, so this is my testing ground.  Bear with me, because at the moment I’d write write content that worry about design, so it might take me a while to pretty-up the joint.

I’ve started and stopped lots of blogs.  One of them, German History Blog, is actually still alive, though in danger of folding if I don’t get motivated and start posting there again.  Another, billdawson.com, I treat as my “home-base”, so to speak, where I let myself talk about anything.  When I get serious about something, I don’t like to post about it at billdawson.com, because the topic will end up getting mixed in with whatever other nonsense I post up there.

Okay, so what is it that I’m “getting serious” about which led me to start yet another blog?

I’m getting serious about having more fun programming and learning new things.

See, I must confess that, at the moment, most of my time is spent maintaining and extending legacy apps, both on the front and the back end.  That’s not such a big problem — it pays the bills nicely.  But I definitely do feel that I’m missing out on something.  Because I think everybody will agree: there is so much cool stuff out there right now.

It’s time to play with it all!  At the moment I’m thinking about things like Appcelerator Titanium, node.js, all the great Javascript libraries like jQuery, those “NoSQL” databases and more.  

It’s so easy to have fun being a programmer right now.  There’s just tons of stuff — amazingly cool stuff — and most of it is completely free.  You could sit down for days on end and just grok the coolness  of so many great projects out there.  I can’t quite do it for days on end — I still gotta work — but I’m going to dive in and finally start exploring new things and mentioning them here.

Sounds like a “master of none” kinda thing.

It’s time for me to put the fun back into coding!