2019 is my 20th year of web development. Well, in 1999 I started updating a corporate website’s sales page via MS Frontpage Express 🤓 live on the server 👻. And at that point that was basically web development right?
Throughout my career, I have been self taught, and have had to learn continuously to keep apace with modern techniques. Non tabular standards based HTML. CSS 2 and 3. Responsive web design. jQuery. PHP (WordPress). Grunt/Gulp/Node. As well as many dead and dying frameworks and platforms.
But over the last couple of years I’ve been aware of one part of my skillset has been lacking. Namely modern Javascript frameworks in the form of React, VUE, Angular. Generally speaking I’ve not really needed much in the past as regards JS, this website has two functions, toggle the search form and set a cookie (for the cookie notice). Some websites use a lot more, but it’s often that sort of thing and I’ve been able to get away with a moderate if not very efficient knowledge of jQuery. Often my approach to writing JavaScript is akin to French philosophy, verbose, dense and often self-referential. It works, but I am always aware it could be better. And it always bugs me how long it takes sometimes to do something that seems simple in my head. I also am intrigued as to the general discussions around React CSS-in-JS, modules and overall methodology (test-driven development, node, deployment).
So for 2019 I am going to embark on learning JavaScript more thoroughly, building up to React (I know VUE and Angular have many benefits but React seems to be edging it for me). I originally decided though to learn ES6 first, as I wanted to understand better the fundamentals rather than dive straight into a framework with little understanding of what’s going on under the hood. Saying that, when I started the ES6 course (ES6 for everyone – Wes Bos) I was a little out of my depth straight away so decided to take it back a step and start with JavaScript fundamentals (JavaScript: Understanding the Weird Parts).
Anyway, I aim to update this site as to my progress, hopefully weekly, or there about. I don’t expect this to be easy but if we don’t continue to learn we don’t grow 🚀