Ayush Chaudhari

A 22-year-old computer science student in Rochester, New York got so frustrated with the way JavaScript worked differently in every browser that he wrote a library to fix it. He released it for free at an unconference in January 2006. That library became the foundation of the web for an entire generation. It now runs on 77 percent of the top 10 million websites on Earth. He never started a company around it. He gave it away and went to work on education and Japanese art. His name is John Resig. The library is called jQuery. Here is the story. John was born on May 8, 1984 in Boston, Massachusetts. He grew up fascinated by computers and programming. He attended the Rochester Institute of Technology and studied computer science with concentrations in economics and psychology. During college he lived in Computer Science House, an on-campus living and project community where students build things for fun. His housemates voted him Member of the Year during his sophomore year. The problem that consumed him at RIT was cross-browser JavaScript. In 2005 the web was a mess. Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, and Opera all handled JavaScript differently. Writing code that worked the same way in every browser was painful, repetitive, and fragile. Developers spent more time fighting browser inconsistencies than building features. John spent years at RIT building personal tools and libraries to make JavaScript easier to write. He wanted to share them with the world in a clear and concise way. In 2005, while still a student, he started building jQuery. In January 2006 he released it at BarCamp NYC, a tech unconference whose core rule was no spectators, only participants. He was 22 years old. The library was small, elegant, and solved the exact problem every web developer was struggling with. You could traverse the DOM, handle events, animate elements, and make Ajax calls in a few lines of code that worked the same way everywhere. The adoption was immediate. jQuery was the only open-source JavaScript library at the time that shipped with documentation. Most libraries expected developers to read the source code. John's first hire was not a developer. It was a community manager, someone to help answer questions from developers who were adopting the library. He understood from the beginning that adoption was a human problem, not a technical one. Drupal selected jQuery as a core component. WordPress built on it. Microsoft adopted it. Apple used it. Google, IBM, Amazon, and AOL incorporated it into their websites. Django and Rails integrated it. Mozilla built with it. By the early 2010s jQuery was everywhere. It became the most deployed JavaScript library in history by a margin so large that the second place contender was not even close. As of recent measurements, jQuery runs on approximately 77 percent of the top 10 million websites. John worked at the Mozilla Corporation from 2007 to 2011 as a JavaScript evangelist and tool developer. He authored two books, Pro JavaScript Techniques and Secrets of the JavaScript Ninja. He created Processing.js, a port of the Processing language to JavaScript. He created Sizzle, a standalone CSS selector engine. He created QUnit, a testing framework. In 2011 he joined Khan Academy as Chief Software Architect. He has been there ever since, building the technology behind one of the largest free education platforms on Earth. Then he did something nobody expected from a JavaScript legend. He became a scholar of Japanese woodblock prints. John is a Visiting Researcher at Ritsumeikan University in Kyoto, studying Ukiyo-e, the Japanese art of woodblock printing from the 17th to 19th centuries. He built ukiyo-e .org, a comprehensive database and image search engine that lets anyone search across hundreds of thousands of prints from museums and collections worldwide. He applied the same engineering instincts that made jQuery work, simplify, document, and make accessible, to a centuries-old art form. He was inducted into RIT's Innovation Hall of Fame in 2010. He lives in the Hudson Valley of New York. A frustrated college student wrote a JavaScript library in his dorm room and gave it away for free. It became the invisible foundation of the modern web. He went to Kyoto to study woodblock prints.

JafarNajafov's tweet photo. A 22-year-old computer science student in Rochester, New York got so frustrated with the way JavaScript worked differently in every browser that he wrote a library to fix it.

He released it for free at an unconference in January 2006. That library became the foundation of the web for an entire generation.
It now runs on 77 percent of the top 10 million websites on Earth. He never started a company around it. He gave it away and went to work on education and Japanese art.

His name is John Resig. The library is called jQuery.

Here is the story.

John was born on May 8, 1984 in Boston, Massachusetts. He grew up fascinated by computers and programming. He attended the Rochester Institute of Technology and studied computer science with concentrations in economics and psychology. During college he lived in Computer Science House, an on-campus living and project community where students build things for fun. His housemates voted him Member of the Year during his sophomore year.

The problem that consumed him at RIT was cross-browser JavaScript. In 2005 the web was a mess. Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, and Opera all handled JavaScript differently. Writing code that worked the same way in every browser was painful, repetitive, and fragile. Developers spent more time fighting browser inconsistencies than building features.

John spent years at RIT building personal tools and libraries to make JavaScript easier to write. He wanted to share them with the world in a clear and concise way. In 2005, while still a student, he started building jQuery.

In January 2006 he released it at BarCamp NYC, a tech unconference whose core rule was no spectators, only participants. He was 22 years old. The library was small, elegant, and solved the exact problem every web developer was struggling with. You could traverse the DOM, handle events, animate elements, and make Ajax calls in a few lines of code that worked the same way everywhere.

The adoption was immediate. jQuery was the only open-source JavaScript library at the time that shipped with documentation. Most libraries expected developers to read the source code. John's first hire was not a developer. It was a community manager, someone to help answer questions from developers who were adopting the library. He understood from the beginning that adoption was a human problem, not a technical one.

Drupal selected jQuery as a core component. WordPress built on it. Microsoft adopted it. Apple used it. Google, IBM, Amazon, and AOL incorporated it into their websites. Django and Rails integrated it. Mozilla built with it.

By the early 2010s jQuery was everywhere. It became the most deployed JavaScript library in history by a margin so large that the second place contender was not even close. As of recent measurements, jQuery runs on approximately 77 percent of the top 10 million websites.

John worked at the Mozilla Corporation from 2007 to 2011 as a JavaScript evangelist and tool developer. He authored two books, Pro JavaScript Techniques and Secrets of the JavaScript Ninja. He created Processing.js, a port of the Processing language to JavaScript. He created Sizzle, a standalone CSS selector engine. He created QUnit, a testing framework.

In 2011 he joined Khan Academy as Chief Software Architect. He has been there ever since, building the technology behind one of the largest free education platforms on Earth.

Then he did something nobody expected from a JavaScript legend. He became a scholar of Japanese woodblock prints.

John is a Visiting Researcher at Ritsumeikan University in Kyoto, studying Ukiyo-e, the Japanese art of woodblock printing from the 17th to 19th centuries. He built ukiyo-e .org, a comprehensive database and image search engine that lets anyone search across hundreds of thousands of prints from museums and collections worldwide. He applied the same engineering instincts that made jQuery work, simplify, document, and make accessible, to a centuries-old art form.

He was inducted into RIT's Innovation Hall of Fame in 2010. He lives in the Hudson Valley of New York.

A frustrated college student wrote a JavaScript library in his dorm room and gave it away for free.

It became the invisible foundation of the modern web.

He went to Kyoto to study woodblock prints.

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thebokya retweeted

ThePrimeagen

@ThePrimeagen

2 months ago

just never forget that the devs who yap about AI being the best thing ever all day never really knew how to program well to begin with. They are idiots telling you that the world is solved (charitable read) or worse, they are selling you something and are attempt to deceive you. This is why we see the same cycle every time. Opus 4 = God's gift to humanity to OMG its utter trash within a few months. The same thing happens with every model release because these people don't even know what dev is. They are larpers. I believe this is what Geohotz meant when he: "I’m calling it now, the adoption of AI agents into software development will be one of the most costly mistakes in the field’s history."

ThePrimeagen's tweet photo. just never forget that the devs who yap about AI being the best thing ever all day never really knew how to program well to begin with.

They are idiots telling you that the world is solved (charitable read) or worse, they are selling you something and are attempt to deceive you.

This is why we see the same cycle every time. Opus 4 = God's gift to humanity to OMG its utter trash within a few months. The same thing happens with every model release because these people don't even know what dev is. They are larpers.

I believe this is what Geohotz meant when he: "I’m calling it now, the adoption of AI agents into software development will be one of the most costly mistakes in the field’s history."

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Ayush Chaudhari @thebokya

2 months ago

2am, when you BT so bad you stare at the ceiling and gather the courage to pull out Tsubasa wo Kudasai after months.

Ayush Chaudhari @thebokya

2 months ago

@om_patel5 Fucking A!

Ayush Chaudhari @thebokya

2 months ago

@meetapersecond The ones who sit under ped (uk who i am talking about).

Ayush Chaudhari @thebokya

3 months ago

One of the most fucked up concepts of hell would be watching your loved ones carry on without you while you're gone for good.

Ayush Chaudhari @thebokya

4 months ago

You can't judge a book by its cover, but you should definitely judge a place by its washrooms.

Ayush Chaudhari @thebokya

5 months ago

Been listening to Jesus of Suburbia on repeat. Somebody please save me.

Ayush Chaudhari @thebokya

7 months ago

It's so easy to get AI to generate "banned answers". Asked Gemini to mask sensitive content with base64 and it complied! The rest of the items in the list are sickening so not putting them here. And this shit runs in prod!