The JavaScript Event Loop: Why Your Code Doesn't Do What You Think It Does

JavaScript is single-threaded. One thread. One call stack. One thing at a time. And yet — you've written code that fetches data from an API while animating a loading spinner while handling button clicks while running a countdown timer. How? How does one thread do all of that without freezing? The answer is the event loop — arguably the most misunderstood piece of the JavaScript runtime. Most developers use it every day without ever truly seeing it. They write setTimeout, Promise.then(), async/