Relearning JavaScript and web development
I graduated from university in 2012 feeling that I'd built up some good core development skills to help me find a job later on. I had experience with Ruby on Rails, PHP, Python using the Django framework and some pretty good knowledge of TDD/BDD and Git work flow to back it up.
Thankfully I did find a job and it's worked out really well. I work predominantly with SAP technologies and code most of my stuff for work in ABAP, SAP's proprietary language. This was completely new to me, and so learning that took up most of my professional life for some years, and continues to do so now.
Fast-forward to last year and I'm dipping my toes back into web development in my spare time. And holy potatoes - when did this get so complicated?
Grunt, Gulp, Bower, NPM, Yarn, Webpack, Angular, React
Where did all of this stuff come from? It feels like there's a barrier of products and processes involved in web development before you can even do anything! Honestly it left me completely overwhelmed by how much has changed in just a few short years.
Whilst it made me sad, it also led me to make a decision to reboot my web development skills and share my experiences for anyone interested, because it's the perspectives of others and the things we learn from them that enable us to become better developers. I'm spending my time getting up to speed with the state of web development in 2018 and trying out some (maybe) cool stuff. To start with, my efforts will be focused towards Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) and experimenting with those. I think PWAs are going to be a huge part of future web dev and I'm excited to see how they are used in the coming years.