airbnb.io - JavaScript Style Guide A mostly reasonable approach to JavaScript73,101

Airbnb Engineering & Data Science

Airbnb.io Spined HTML

Airbnb Engineering & Data Science Airbnb.ioUnshutSourceEventsBlogGithubCareersAirbnb.io JavaScript Style GuideA mostly reasonable tideway to JavaScript73,101By Harrison ShoffWhy does JavaScript need a style guide? Let's say you start an e-commerce site. Your first engineer is Picasso during his undecorous period. Your codebase quickly becomes filled with Picasso undecorous period javascript files. He paints you a javascript shopping cart without a problem. He's washed-up it a million times before. But this is his weightier one. It's his masterpiece. And very blue. Your second engineer is Salvador Dali. He shows up on his first day with a camera, a single paintbrush, a silly mustache, and starts contributing some crazy surrealist javascript files. This influences Picasso as they work together and Picasso starts switching things up and begins subtracting cubism files to the codebase. The codebase is so new that Picasso and Dali can protract subtracting new files at any time with no harm, considering there is no maintenance when it's just two engineers subtracting new functionality. No one is stepping on each other's toes. There's unbearable paint for everyone. Then you rent Monet and he comes in and leaves his impression on everything. Now you have a undecorous period shopping cart, impressionist image lazy loading, surrealist photo slide show, and cubism style event tracking in /app/assets/javascripts. The javascripts folder becomes a museum. Let's jump to the future 4 years later. Lots of major functionality has once been built. Picasso has left the visitor to pursue a visitor built on a guernica style. Your merchantry focus has shifted a bit and you need someone to proffer Picasso's undecorous period shopping cart to support collaborative shopping (lots of people sharing the same cart in realtime). Luckily you just hired a rising star in javascript land that likes to spray paint things on the wall, his name is Banksy. So you tell Banksy, "Hey for your first job we need you to modify our shopping cart so it supports collaboration. Timing is really important for the big relaunch, fortunately this should be really easy considering we once have Picasso's shopping cart and it's once a masterpiece. Just reuse that." So Banksy goes in and spray paints over your Picasso shopping cart and makes it collaborative and you have a big successful relaunch. A month later a bug report comes in well-nigh removing items from the shopping cart. Banksy is rented on flipside project, so you get Monet to go in and fix it. Monet doesn't know how to use spray paint cans. So his attempts to fix it are sloppy. He breaks the build. He switches when to the skim and just paints over it, but it took a lot longer than it should have considering of the time to understand and prefer an unfamiliar style. When you have over 80 engineers contributing to one codebase, you quickly learn your usual ways of doing things don't work. So we try to turn everyone into Picasso. No matter where you jump in to the codebase, all the files are familiar and squint like they were painted by you. The most important thing, no matter what your preferred javascript style is, is to be resulting when working with a team or a large codebase that will have to be maintained in the future. The style that works weightier for our team is our Picasso style since that's how it all started. We unshut sourced our style guide so other teams could fork it and turn it into a Monet style guide or a Banksy style guide. Which is lots of fun to watch. As an individual painter/engineer working on side projects and exploring all the wonderful things you can do with javascript, please throw conventions yonder and ignore everything anyone has overly said. It's the only way the world will enjoy the next Picasso.LinksGithubES6+ Style GuideReact Style GuideCSS-in-JS Style GuideES5 Style Guide (Deprecated)Gitter© Airbnb, Inc.© Airbnb, Inc.CareersDesignCareersDesignCareersDesign