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John Resig

Summary

John Resig is a programmer who created jQuery, the JavaScript library he first sketched in an August 2005 blog post and announced at BarCamp NYC on January 14, 2006, while he was still in college. He studied computer science at the Rochester Institute of Technology, worked on JavaScript tools at Mozilla from 2007 to 2011, wrote Pro JavaScript Techniques and co-wrote Secrets of the JavaScript Ninja, and joined Khan Academy in May 2011, where he is Chief Software Architect.

Web Building Encyclopedia · People · Last reviewed October 22, 2026 · 10 min read

Who John Resig is

John Resig is a programmer who created jQuery, which his own site calls “the most popular JavaScript library in the world.”1 RIT describes jQuery as a lightweight JavaScript library that simplifies moving through a page’s HTML, handling events, animation and Ajax.2 His own site describes him today as Chief Software Architect at Khan Academy, which works to provide a free education to everyone online.1

A JavaScript library is a file of prewritten code that a web page loads and then calls, so the site’s own scripts can be shorter. The full history of the software, its versions and its security fixes are covered in the jQuery entry; this entry follows Resig’s own part in it and his other work on the web.

His work touches the web in four ways:

  • Libraries. He wrote jQuery and several smaller projects that grew out of it, including the Sizzle selector engine and the QUnit testing framework.3
  • Browser tools. From 2007 to 2011 he worked at the Mozilla Corporation on JavaScript speed tests and testing tools.4
  • Books. He wrote Pro JavaScript Techniques and co-wrote Secrets of the JavaScript Ninja.1
  • Teaching. At Khan Academy, which he joined in May 2011, he built the interactive programming course that teaches beginners to code in the browser.5

As of October 2026, W3Techs finds jQuery on 64.5% of all websites, and on 85.5% of the sites whose JavaScript library it can identify.6

RIT and the idea behind jQuery (2002 to 2006)

Resig studied computer science at the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) in New York State, in its Golisano College of Computing and Information Sciences.7 RIT’s Innovation Hall of Fame page gives his years there as 2002 to 2005, with a focus on databases and concentrations in economics and psychology.2 RIT’s alumni office lists him as a 2009 bachelor’s graduate.7

At RIT he lived in Computer Science House, a student residence for computing students, and was named its House Member of the Year in his sophomore year.2 From 2003 to 2005 he worked at the university’s Center for Discovery Informatics on IMSCAN, a project that mined social networks from instant messaging data. It produced papers in 2004 and 2005, including two presented at data mining conferences in 2004.8

On August 22, 2005, Resig published a blog post called “Selectors in Javascript.” It proposed attaching JavaScript to page elements by picking them out with CSS-style selectors, the same patterns a style sheet uses, through a single $() function whose methods could be chained one after another.9 He presented it as an improvement on an existing library called Behaviour, which he found “too tedious and verbose for everyday use.”9 jQuery’s own history page lists that post as the project’s first entry.10

On January 14, 2006, Resig took the library to BarCamp NYC, a weekend event where attendees gave presentations.1112 In his wrap-up post two days later he wrote that he had announced “jQuery: New Wave Javascript” during the event’s Hot Demo Session.12 Ten years on he recalled that he was still in college at the time.13

Sources frame the start date in two ways. RIT and the 2012 jQuery Foundation announcement say he created jQuery in 2005, while the project’s tenth-anniversary post treats the January 2006 announcement as its birth.21411

jQuery’s early years and handing it on (2006 to 2012)

Resig announced jQuery 1.0 on August 26, 2006, with many bug fixes, new features and a reorganized development process. In the post he noted that it came nearly a year after he first proposed the idea on his blog.15

The library arrived during the later years of the browser wars, when scripts often had to be written differently for each browser. Resig later said he built it because he was “really frustrated by the browser inconsistencies.”16 Its helpers included Ajax, the technique of loading data from the server in the background without reloading the page.2

Large projects adopted it. WordPress 2.2, released on May 15, 2007, switched its own core JavaScript to jQuery, which its release notes describe as lighter and faster.17 RIT’s Hall of Fame page lists WordPress, Mozilla, Drupal, Django and Rails among the open-source projects using it, and Microsoft, IBM, Google, AOL and Amazon among the companies.2 In December 2009 jQuery won the .net Magazine Award for best open source application.18

Several of Resig’s other projects came out of jQuery’s needs:

  • Sizzle. jQuery 1.3, released on January 14, 2009, introduced Sizzle, a new engine for matching CSS selectors. Resig’s announcement said it would live as its own project under the Dojo Foundation so that developers of other JavaScript libraries could work on it too.19 Sizzle was released that January.20 Resig’s own projects page now says Sizzle has been largely superseded by querySelectorAll, the same kind of selector lookup built into browsers.3
  • QUnit. QUnit, a unit testing framework, began as part of jQuery. It gained its own name, home and documentation in 2008, and a 2009 rewrite removed its dependence on jQuery.21 jQuery’s history page dates its first release to May 9, 2008.10

The same January 2009 post explained that the projects were owned by individuals: Resig owned jQuery, and Paul Bakaus, lead developer of jQuery UI, owned that project. It announced a move to the Software Freedom Conservancy, a nonprofit, so that no single person would own the project’s code.19

In a post dated May 3, 2011, Resig wrote that Mozilla had let him work on jQuery full time for about a year and a half, a period that had produced nine jQuery releases, including jQuery 1.6, released that day.4 He said he planned to cut back to a more manageable share of the work.4

When the jQuery Foundation was announced on March 6, 2012, Dave Methvin had recently become head of the core development team and was to be the foundation’s president. Resig said he was spending more time on programming education at Khan Academy and remained part of the core team.14 In 2016 he described 2011 as the year he stepped down from the project, after which a team of other developers kept it running smoothly.13 His projects page also gives 2011 as the year he stepped down.3

Mozilla and JavaScript tools (2007 to 2011)

Resig joined the Mozilla Corporation in January 2007 as a JavaScript Evangelist, someone paid to promote the language and help developers use it.4 Mozilla says the corporation, set up in August 2005, is a wholly owned taxable subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation.22 Resig later moved to the role of JavaScript Tool Developer.4

A February 2009 post on Google’s developer blog introduced him as Mozilla’s JavaScript evangelist and a member of the Firebug Working Group. Firebug was an add-on for the Firefox browser, and FireUnit, below, was built to work inside it.2324 His projects from these years include:

  • env.js (July 2007). A simulated browser, written in JavaScript, that ran on Rhino, a JavaScript engine for Java. It could load unmodified copies of jQuery and other libraries and pass jQuery’s test suite, so browser scripts could be tested or used for scraping pages without a real browser.25
  • Dromaeo (April 2008). A JavaScript performance test suite that he was working on with browser makers as a common, statistically sound benchmark.26 A benchmark is a standard set of tasks used to compare how fast different browsers run code.
  • Processing.js (May 2008). A port of the Processing visualization language to JavaScript, drawing with the HTML canvas element. On release it was a single file of about 5,000 lines, aimed at Firefox 3, WebKit nightly builds and Opera 9.5.27 By April 2009 Alistair MacDonald was its main maintainer.20 A later maintainer archived the code in 2018, by which time the p5.js project had taken its place.2829
  • FireUnit (December 2008). A Firefox and Firebug extension, built with Jan Odvarko of the Firebug team, that gave scripts a simple way to log test results and view them in a Firebug tab.24
  • TestSwarm (March 2009). A proposal for crowd-sourced testing. Resig wrote that jQuery needed at least 10 test suites run in 12 browsers before and after each change, including three versions of Internet Explorer and two of Chrome.30 TestSwarm would let volunteers keep a browser window open that fetched and ran tests from a central server.30

His 2011 post also credits his Mozilla years with FUEL, a JavaScript library for writing Firefox extensions, and with improvements to QUnit.4

Books and writing

Resig has written about JavaScript in books and on his blog.

BookPublisherPublishedAuthors
Pro JavaScript TechniquesApressDecember 13, 2006John Resig31
Secrets of the JavaScript NinjaManningDecember 2012John Resig and Bear Bibeault32
Pro JavaScript Techniques, second editionApressJuly 1, 2015John Resig, Russ Ferguson and John Paxton33
Secrets of the JavaScript Ninja, second editionManningAugust 2016John Resig, Bear Bibeault and Josip Maras34
The GraphQL GuideSold through graphql.guideCopyright 2024 on its siteJohn Resig and Loren Sands-Ramshaw35

Pro JavaScript Techniques skips basic syntax. Its five parts cover an introduction to modern JavaScript; object-oriented code, reusable code, testing and debugging; scripting the page and its events; Ajax; and the future of the language, where the publisher’s description lists JSON and HTML5.31 Secrets of the JavaScript Ninja teaches how to design and maintain a cross-browser JavaScript library, with chapters on functions, closures, objects and regular expressions.32 Its second edition was revised for ES6 and ES7, newer editions of the JavaScript standard.34

The GraphQL Guide covers GraphQL, a query language for fetching data from a server, which its site compares with REST. It runs to 886 pages in 12 chapters.35

Several of his blog posts published short pieces of working code. In March 2008 he published about 25 lines that imitated classical inheritance in JavaScript, drawing on the base2 and Prototype libraries.36 In July 2008 he followed with a small templating function that turned a template into a reusable JavaScript function and stored templates inside script tags that browsers ignore.37

Khan Academy (2011 to today)

In his May 3, 2011, post Resig announced that he was leaving Mozilla to join Khan Academy full time, leading its open-source efforts and JavaScript development. He listed his first tasks as rewriting its framework for problem sets and building its first iPad app.4 His projects page says he started there in May 2011.5

On August 14, 2012, he announced Khan Academy Computer Science, a course for people with no programming experience. Its editor showed code on the left and a drawing canvas on the right, and ran each change immediately. Students wrote JavaScript, and the drawings were made with Processing.js.38 He credited a talk by Bret Victor on responsive programming as the inspiration for the real-time design.38

His projects page describes the tools he built for that course:5

  • Live Editor. The code editor used by the programming curriculum, which runs JavaScript with Processing.js, web pages written in HTML, JavaScript and CSS, and SQL through a version of the SQLite database compiled to run in the browser.
  • StructuredJS. A tool that analyzes the structure of a learner’s JavaScript to test it and give targeted hints.
  • Khan Exercise Framework. A framework for building math exercises, used from 2011 to 2016 and now deprecated.

The same page says he went on to lead the Frontend Infrastructure team, which works on the design system, build and deploy systems, server-side rendering and the mobile apps.5 RIT’s page for his 2015 Distinguished Alumni Award gives his title as Dean of Computer Science.7

In a July 2024 episode of the Syntax podcast, Resig said Khan Academy had been “the 1st consumers of react outside of Facebook,” and that it now uses TypeScript after an earlier bet on a rival type checker called Flow.16 React is a JavaScript library for building user interfaces, and TypeScript adds type checking to JavaScript.

Outside his day job, Resig applies computer vision, software that compares images, to art history. In December 2012 Ukiyo-e.org, one of the image databases he built, launched as a search engine for Japanese woodblock prints that groups copies of the same print from different collections.1 As of October 2026 its about page lists over 200,000 prints from more than 24 institutions.39 The Frick Collection credits him with the image-recognition technology developed for PHAROS, an art research consortium building a shared platform for photo archives of artworks.40 His other recognition includes RIT’s Innovation Hall of Fame in 2010 and its Distinguished Alumni Award in 2015.7

Timeline

  1. Resig marks jQuery's 10th anniversary on his blog13
  2. Resig launches Ukiyo-e.org, a search engine for Japanese woodblock prints39
  3. Manning publishes Secrets of the JavaScript Ninja32
  4. Resig announces Khan Academy Computer Science38
  5. The jQuery Foundation is announced, with Dave Methvin as president14
  6. Resig announces he is leaving Mozilla for Khan Academy, the day jQuery 1.6 ships4
  7. Resig proposes TestSwarm for crowd-sourced browser testing30
  8. jQuery 1.3 introduces the Sizzle selector engine19
  9. Resig releases Processing.js27
  10. Resig presents Dromaeo, a JavaScript performance test suite26
  11. Resig joins the Mozilla Corporation as a JavaScript Evangelist4
  12. Apress publishes Pro JavaScript Techniques31
  13. Resig releases jQuery 1.015
  14. Resig announces jQuery at BarCamp NYC11
  15. Resig blogs the selector-based idea behind jQuery9

What it means for your website

Resig’s main mark on today’s websites is jQuery. As of October 2026, W3Techs finds it on 64.5% of all websites, so there is a good chance yours loads it too.6

  • Find out whether your site uses jQuery. View your page source and search for “jquery.” On self-hosted WordPress it usually comes from WordPress itself, which switched its core scripts to jQuery in version 2.2 in 2007.17 A theme or plugin may load its own extra copy. Our WordPress review covers what running a self-hosted site involves.
  • Check the version. As of October 2026, W3Techs finds version 1 on 17.0% of jQuery sites.6 Old versions carry known security flaws, and the jQuery entry lists the cutoffs and how to upgrade safely.
  • Test in more than one browser. Resig’s TestSwarm post counted 12 browsers that jQuery had to pass before each change.30 Browsers agree far more today, but a quick check of your key pages in Chrome, Safari, Firefox and on a phone still catches layout and form problems.
  • New code may not need a library. Resig himself says browsers’ built-in querySelectorAll has largely replaced Sizzle, the selector engine inside jQuery.3 For a small script on a new site, ask your developer whether plain JavaScript will do. Every extra file is one more download, as our glossary entry on Core Web Vitals explains.
  • Learn the basics for free. The Khan Academy course he built teaches JavaScript, HTML, CSS and SQL in the browser, with no software to install.5 It is a gentle way to understand what your developer or builder is doing, alongside our guide to how a website works.

See also

References

  1. About John Resig. John Resig, johnresig.com. accessed October 22, 2026.
  2. John Resig, Innovation Hall of Fame. Rochester Institute of Technology. accessed October 22, 2026.
  3. jQuery (projects). John Resig, johnresig.com. accessed October 22, 2026.
  4. Next Steps in 2011. John Resig, johnresig.com. 2011-05-03. accessed October 22, 2026.
  5. Khan Academy (projects). John Resig, johnresig.com. accessed October 22, 2026.
  6. Usage statistics and market share of jQuery for websites. W3Techs. 2026-10-23. accessed October 22, 2026.
  7. John E. Resig, Distinguished Alumni Award. Rochester Institute of Technology. accessed October 22, 2026.
  8. Research. John Resig, johnresig.com. accessed October 22, 2026.
  9. Selectors in Javascript. John Resig, johnresig.com. 2005-08-22. accessed October 22, 2026.
  10. jQuery History. jQuery, OpenJS Foundation. accessed October 22, 2026.
  11. Ten Years of jQuery and Beyond. Official jQuery Blog. 2016-01-14. accessed October 22, 2026.
  12. BarCampNYC Wrap-up. John Resig, johnresig.com. 2006-01-16. accessed October 22, 2026.
  13. 10th Anniversary of jQuery. John Resig, johnresig.com. 2016-01-14. accessed October 22, 2026.
  14. Announcing the jQuery Foundation. Official jQuery Blog. 2012-03-06. accessed October 22, 2026.
  15. jQuery 1.0. John Resig, Official jQuery Blog. 2006-08-26. accessed October 22, 2026.
  16. Why the jQuery Creator Uses React and TypeScript (Syntax episode 800, transcript). Syntax. 2024-07-26. accessed October 22, 2026.
  17. WordPress 2.2. WordPress.org Documentation. 2007-05-15. accessed October 22, 2026.
  18. jQuery Wins .net Magazine Award. John Resig, Official jQuery Blog. 2009-12-03. accessed October 22, 2026.
  19. jQuery 1.3 and the jQuery Foundation. John Resig, Official jQuery Blog. 2009-01-14. accessed October 22, 2026.
  20. New Processing.js and Sizzle.js Sites. John Resig, johnresig.com. 2009-04-25. accessed October 22, 2026.
  21. About QUnit. QUnit, OpenJS Foundation. accessed October 22, 2026.
  22. The Mozilla Corporation. Mozilla. accessed October 22, 2026.
  23. John Resig: Drop-in JavaScript Performance. Google for Developers Blog. 2009-02-09. accessed October 22, 2026.
  24. FireUnit: JavaScript Unit Testing Extension. John Resig, johnresig.com. 2008-12-18. accessed October 22, 2026.
  25. Bringing the Browser to the Server. John Resig, johnresig.com. 2007-07-09. accessed October 22, 2026.
  26. Dromaeo: JavaScript Performance Testing. John Resig, johnresig.com. 2008-04-11. accessed October 22, 2026.
  27. Processing.js. John Resig, johnresig.com. 2008-05-08. accessed October 22, 2026.
  28. Processing.js 2008-2018. David Humphrey, Bread & Circuits. 2018-12-02. accessed October 22, 2026.
  29. Miscellaneous (projects). John Resig, johnresig.com. accessed October 22, 2026.
  30. JavaScript Testing Does Not Scale. John Resig, johnresig.com. 2009-03-20. accessed October 22, 2026.
  31. Pro JavaScript Techniques. Apress, Springer Nature. 2006-12-13. accessed October 22, 2026.
  32. Secrets of the JavaScript Ninja. Manning Publications. 2012-12. accessed October 22, 2026.
  33. Pro JavaScript Techniques, Second Edition. Apress, Springer Nature. 2015-07-01. accessed October 22, 2026.
  34. Secrets of the JavaScript Ninja, Second Edition. Manning Publications. 2016-08. accessed October 22, 2026.
  35. The GraphQL Guide. John Resig and Loren Sands-Ramshaw, graphql.guide. accessed October 22, 2026.
  36. Simple JavaScript Inheritance. John Resig, johnresig.com. 2008-03-20. accessed October 22, 2026.
  37. JavaScript Micro-Templating. John Resig, johnresig.com. 2008-07-16. accessed October 22, 2026.
  38. Redefining the Introduction to Computer Science. John Resig, johnresig.com. 2012-08-14. accessed October 22, 2026.
  39. About Ukiyo-e.org. Ukiyo-e.org. accessed October 22, 2026.
  40. The Frick Collection Leads International Collaboration to Unlock Access to 25 Million Images of Artworks. The Frick Collection. accessed October 22, 2026.

Web Building Encyclopedia. First published October 22, 2026. Last reviewed October 22, 2026. Every fact on this page is linked to a source we opened. Spotted an error? Write to [email protected].