Sometimes you use a pattern so frequently that you don’t realize that other people might not know about it. Here’s the most recent one for me — I was surprised that this wasn’t being used in the last few codebases I’ve seen:

If you’re using Backbone.js, instead of writing

view.$el.find('span.timestamp')

or worse

$(view.el).find('span.timestamp')

or

$('span.timestamp', view.$el)

Backbone provides a $ method such that you can simply write

view.$('span.timestamp')

It’s less to type and it doesn’t hurt readability.