JavaScript is the language of the web. This dual role requires it to constantly evolve with new features while maintaining backward compatibility so older websites don’t break. This means that adopting modern, improved features is the developer’s responsibility. You’ll still find outdated practices, like using var, in brand-new codebases in 2025. Today, we’ll focus on one modern feature that should be strictly adopted: using the Nullish Coalescing operator (??) in place of the Logical OR (||) for providing default values.

For the past couple of years, like many other software developers, I have fully integrated generative AI into my development toolkit. I want to share my journey and my experience with the different tools that have shaped my workflow. Early Days: ChatGPT and the Beginning of a New Age 🔗When ChatGPT launched in late 2022, the reaction was immediate. We tried it, we were horrified it would take our jobs, and I decided I didn’t want that anxiety.

As IT professionals, we live in a world of text. From source code and markup to configuration files and terabytes of logs, our days are spent creating, reading, and manipulating text in its many forms—JSON, XML, CSV, and beyond. In the last decade, our toolkits have become incredibly sophisticated. We lean heavily on powerful GUI editors like VS Code and, more recently, on LLMs to handle even minor text processing jobs.