You’ve been waiting for the next module of Just JavaScript to drop in your inbox. Instead, you got this letter, with the word “goodbye” in the title. What happened? I have both good and bad news, depending on your perspective.

Goodbye for Now

Just JavaScript has been a long time in the making. We’ve been discussing Just JavaScript with Maggie (who made all of the gorgeous illustrations!) since November 2018 — way before we decided on the name or the vision.

Throughout 2019, we have been brainstorming it together, trying out different visual metaphors and prototyping how to explain more complex concepts. We had a vision but did not have a clear plan, and the project had stalled.

In September 2019, the final project name came to me in the shower, and I became determined to make Just JavaScript into a reality. Although our original vision was an interactive learning playground, we’ve scoped it down to an illustrated book for the first edition. We needed to get something out.

The Email List

I’ve started writing it as a “book”, and guess what, writing is hard. I had many doubts about the ordering and pacing, and by the time I finished writing the first drafts, I knew they were absolutely no good and I was repulsed by them.

By the end of 2019, we knew that if we don’t make the next move, the project would die. This is when we decided to go with the email list. Ostensibly, the goal of this list was to test our explanations on the real people and verify that our approach wasn’t an outlandish fantasy that makes sense to the two of us.

But to me personally, the goal of the email list was also to force myself to finish something — even if it doesn’t represent our full vision. I wrote the signup form copy text, and soon enough, we had our first subscribers. Now we had no choice but to send something to them! There was no way back.

Although I had planned to send the original drafts one by one, I disliked them so much that I didn’t use them at all. Instead, I wrote every module from scratch. But this time, I had readers — people like you — who have made all the difference. I am deeply thankful for your letters, stories, and thoughts.

Thank you.

(And to the occasional jerks — screw you, haha.)

This email list started as a way to break my procrastination. We’d never have expected that it would grow to more than 85 thousand readers and a whole million emails sent. We are grateful to egghead who have kept the lights on so far, as we wouldn’t afford running such a massive free email list ourselves.

But all things must come to an end.

Endings and Beginnings

Originally, our plan was to cover a few more topics in the scope of this list.

We’ve already covered different types of values, variables, objects, properties, mutation, and prototypes, but there is so much more to talk about! Even if we focus on fundamentals, we haven’t yet discussed the order in which the code runs, how function calls and this work, or the mental model for closures.

However, while the email format was a blessing at first, it has outlived its use. Many of you wrote that you find emails inconvenient, and prefer reading long-form content outside of your mailbox. For every module, we spend a lot of time tweaking the length so that the email clients don’t clip the content. Many of our emails fall into spam or fail to get delivered. The service we use for quizzes sometimes crashes, and the images are too small due to its layout. Each next chapter is more challenging, but this format is not sustainable.

Thanks to you, we now feel confident in Just JavaScript. Your support has shown us that it is not a fantasy anymore. It is real. And we think it deserves to be more than rough drafts split into emails. We believe now that we can put it on a website and some of you will support our work. And we want to iterate faster so that someday it becomes more than a book with pictures.

There is a lot of work ahead, and there are only so many things we can focus on. So for now, we are saying goodbye to you, our dear readers. We hope that you’ve learned something fun, useful, or both. Please don’t hesitate to reply one more time with your feelings and thoughts. We love to hear from you.

This is a goodbye — but we don’t say goodbye forever. The JavaScript universe is still there. One day, we’ll ask you if you want to visit it again.

We hope you’ll say yes.

Dan and Maggie