Our Little Adventure: The 2019 Ajax Squad
So, let me tell you about this “2019 ajax squad” chapter. It wasn’t some big, planned-out strategic initiative, not really. It was more like, “Hey, the website’s creaking like an old ship, someone do something!” Our main site, especially the user account section, was painfully slow. Every single click, boom, full page reload. You could make a coffee waiting for stuff to update. Users were, understandably, not thrilled.
Finally, one of the higher-ups, who probably just heard the buzzword “AJAX” in a meeting, said, “Make it faster with that AJAX magic!” And just like that, a few of us were unofficially crowned the “ajax squad.” None of us were exactly AJAX wizards at the start, mind you. We knew the basics, but putting it into a live, cranky old system? That was gonna be fun.
Diving In and Getting Our Hands Dirty
First up, we had to pinpoint the worst offenders. We spent a solid week just mapping out the user flows that felt like wading through treacle. Forms, data grids, profile updates – they were all prime candidates. It wasn’t rocket science to see where the page reloads were killing the experience.
Then came the actual doing. We decided to start small, with something like updating user preferences. Our first attempts? Oh boy. It was a clunky mess. Sometimes it worked, sometimes the whole page would just blank out, or the data wouldn’t save. We learned pretty quickly that just throwing `fetch` calls around wasn’t going to cut it.
- We basically had to re-school ourselves on handling asynchronous stuff properly in JavaScript. Lots of console logs, lots of “why isn’t this working?!”
- Communicating with the backend was another hurdle. The existing endpoints were built to serve whole HTML pages. We had to convince the backend team to give us new endpoints that just spat out JSON. That took some back-and-forth, let me tell you.
- And then browsers. Oh, the joys of Internet Explorer still being a thing for some of our users back then. What worked fine in Chrome would just explode elsewhere. Good times.
Those “Facepalm” Moments and Sweet Little Victories
I vividly remember this one feature – a dynamic table that users could sort and filter without a page refresh. Seemed straightforward. It took us nearly two weeks to nail it down. We hit every snag imaginable: requests firing too often, UI not updating correctly, weird caching issues. There were days we just wanted to flip the table, literally.
But, when we finally got that table working slick and smooth? Man, that felt good. We’d gather around one of our crappy old monitors and just click the sort buttons over and over, like kids with a new toy. “Look! No reload! It’s instant!” Those little wins kept us going.
We weren’t using any fancy, big-name JavaScript frameworks for this particular fix-it job. It was mostly plain old JavaScript, wrestling with those `XMLHttpRequest` objects directly or using `fetch` with a lot of careful error checking. We probably wrote more code to handle things going wrong than for the actual features themselves.
How It All Wrapped Up
Over the course of a few months, our little “squad” managed to patch up the most painful parts of that old system. We systematically went through the identified problem areas and injected AJAX where it made sense. The site wasn’t suddenly brand new, but the key interactions were way, way faster. We even got a few “hey, this is much better!” comments from users, which was like gold dust.
The “ajax squad” kind of just dissolved after that, folks moving onto other projects. No parades, no bonuses, just the quiet satisfaction of having made something noticeably less frustrating to use. That old codebase is probably long gone by now, replaced with something far more modern. But yeah, that was our little stint as the 2019 ajax squad. Just a regular bunch of devs trying to make things a bit smoother, one asynchronous call at a time. Definitely learned a lot in the trenches there.