The Modular JavaScript book series is going to launch its crowdfunding campaign in a week. If you already follow me on Twitter, this may sound like old news.

I want people to be excited about Modular JavaScript, but I don’t want to spoil the surprise! Here’s what’s happened thus far.

Pre-launch Thunderclap Campaign

We’ve started a highly successful Thunderclap campaign, which at the time of this writing has 260% support and 1.9M in social reach. Thunderclap campaigns are similar to crowdfunding, except that you contribute your social reach instead of hard cash. The way it works is that once the campaign ends, on November 11th, a single tweet (or Facebook post) will be posted to your account. The kicker is that Thunderclap posts your message alongside everyone else’s, resulting in 260+ people tweeting about Modular JavaScript at the same time.

Quite a few of the backers for the Thunderclap campaign have some serious reach. Smashing Magazine contributed their 991K followers, JavaScript Daily backed us with 222K followers, Lea Verou chipped in with her over 72K, and so on. In total, backers have over 1.9M followers in aggregate, making for 1.9M potential people who see these tweets. That’s the campaign’s reach.

I first saw a barrage of tweets about CSS Conf 2016 on my timeline, and I was impressed by the “shock and awe” aspect of their social outreach – how did they do that? After some snooping around I found their Thunderclap campaign, which peaked at 405K of social reach, and I knew I wanted to run one of these for Modular JavaScript.

There’s an @mjavascript Twitter account you can follow for everything related to the series. Upon launch, a week from now, there will be a bunch more ways to learn about the series, contribute to it with either code or donations, and read the raw content – for free – as I work on it. The same content that’s managed on GitHub repos will also be available here on ponyfoo.com, but prettified with CSS in such a way that it almost feels like any Pony Foo article you’ve read before.

Community Endorsements!

We’ve made public a few endorsement videos from folks around the community, with more to come.

The first one comes from Jake Archibald, of Google. He’s a hilarious personality, but don’t let the hilarity fool you – he’s extremely knowledgeable. Here’s what Jake had to say:

Today, I shared a video from Dan Abramov, of Facebook. You may know Dan from his tireless work around the React ecosystem – on redux, react-dnd, react-hot-loader, as well as on react itself. Dan also took the time to record a video talking about the Modular JavaScript book series project.

I’m super thankful for getting so many endorsement videos, but this means I have to release more than one a day if I want to show off all of them before the campaign launches in a week! Later today, I released another video. This one comes from Belén Curcio, of Mozilla. She likes React as well, and is working on Coral Project in collaboration with the New York Times, Washington Post, and other news organizations.

I’ve taken the time to add close captioning to every video, and included a link to the full transcripts on each video’s description on YouTube. As it turns out, that takes quite a bit of time! But I think accessibility is worth that time.

Recently, Suz Hinton mentioned on Twitter how accessibility is not a nice-to-have for web developers, but something we should build into our products. Products should be built with accesibility in mind – from the get go.

if do front-end dev, you have an obligation to know how to produce accessible websites. It’s not “specialised knowledge” - it’s your job.
— Suz Hinton (@noopkat) October 17, 2016

Frequently Asked Questions

Here’s a few questions I get a lot, and the answers to those questions.

How much of these five books has already been written?

I’ve already written two thirds of the first book. They’ll be written sequentially, since I’m the only author for the series.

When will the crowdfunding campaign launch?

On October 25th, through Indiegogo. It’ll have some awesome perks, so I highly encourage that you stay on the lookout for the campaign!

What else will launch that day?

An open-source GitHub repo, with all the contents I’ve written so far for Practical Modern JavaScript, the first book in the series
The HTML-based version of that same book
An official launch announcement here on Pony Foo with even more information

Are there any support materials?

In addition to the open-source repos on GitHub, I’m planning on shooting video screencasts to complement each book on the series. This effort will largely depend on the outcome of the crowdfunding campaign.

Who is helping you steer this effort?

I’m largely working on this on my own. O’Reilly Media will provide editing, proofing, and physical book distribution, which is a huge relief. I’ve also partnered with egghead.io for the complementary screencast series. Together, they’ll ensure my books and screencasts are of excellent quality.