360° JS becomes Modern Web Apps
Published on 23 September 2017 • 2 min

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360° JS is kind of our best-seller, a brand unto itself. It is the single unique course we schedule for multi-client sessions every month! And yet, the time has come to make the jump and rebrand it, dealing with the related risks. Why is that?

A bit of history…

Historically, our “360°” training line expresses their ambition of a 360° vision of their ecosystem. In the early days we had single-day, more narrow courses: Powerful JS for the language itself, Guru JS for single-page apps (using Backbone and Underscore back then), Shielded JS on tests and industrialization… When we drafted the “Christmas list” course that aimed, over 4 days, to cover all that and more, it only seemed natural to name it “360° JS”.

Our Git series saw a similar evolution, with “Daily Git” and “Advanced Git” merging and expanding into “360° Git”.

Note that we regarded as wishful the idea that 4 days would cover enough of the Node.js ecosystem that we could dare name it “360° Node,” so it remained just “Node.js” this time around 😉

Issues surface

The “360° JS” name wasn’t without problems, which made themselves apparent over the years.

  1. Some people were misled into thinking the training was about the language alone, and all of it, and turned out disappointed.
  2. As a corollary, the name didn’t make it clear what the training truly was about and aimed to provide: all the necessary skills to build state-of-the-art front-end web apps.
  3. A training that actually is about 100% of the language is in the pipes, that will be named “360° ES,” so there would be a massive name confusion there.

We looked long and hard for a better name, fully aware that at this stage lots of people knew the 360° JS “brand” and were looking it up to find us, meaning we’d have to manage the transition carefully.

The new name

We settled on something that isn’t quite love-at-first-sight; the thing is, the requirements for that name are quite heavy: reasonably short, representing the scope well, not misleading, low risk of conflict with other trainings (current or planned)…

In the end, Modern Web Apps won. Had the content been more focused on Progressive Web Apps, we likely would have used that, but we felt that not covering stuff like App Shells and Page Shells, to name only these, was a no-go for such an opportunistic road.

So there it is: no more 360° JS, it is now Modern Web Apps. Long live that new name!