This year I will be looking to level up my web development game on the front end as well as the back end. Now that I have a foundational understanding of front end frameworks, back end frameworks and mobile development, this year I want to dig deeper into these nooks so I can move past being just an everyday web developer.

I will try to list the technologies in which I plan to learn in chronological order. But as we know in life, things don't always go to plan. However, I would prefer to set ambitious goals to see where it takes me.

Typescript

Welcome to 2016...I know, I am late to the party however, better late than never. Through my web development journey in 2019 / 2020, I have found so many use cases for something like Typescript. The more I program, the more structure and predictability I want in my code. I think implementing Typescript into my future projects will hopefully save me time in debugging code and give Javascript the faith to run reliably that it needs.

These are the resources I plan to use to learn Typescript.

TypeScript Course for Beginners 2021 - Learn TypeScript from Scratch!

Learn TypeScript (Ditch JavaScript)

Swift / iOS Development

I have taken up a Swift subject in my Computer Science degree for this semester. I hope this will give me a better understanding of the iOS ecosystem so help me debug my React Native projects. I also think this will be beneficial for my current job as they have just hired an Android developer but are yet to have an iOS developer.

Deno

I think the eventual evolution from Node.js is to learn Deno. Deno created a bit of buzz last year when it was released by the original creator (Ryan Dahl) of Node.js. Ryan Dahl believe Deno solves a lot of design flaws of Node.js and natively support Typescript. I am quite excited to jump on board a technology that is quite new and to adopt it early.

React Native Animations

I am currently building my first app for a paying client. I have found that little animations and transitions can elevate your app 10 fold. Unfortunately, I don't have the knowledge to implement these complex animations yet. Through watching Youtube videos, mainly William Candillon and Catalin Miron's channels, I have been able to see the amazing effects you can bring to your app to improve the user experience. I will be taking William Candillon's course on Gestures and Animations to hopefully increase my stock as an App Developer.

Learn React Native Gestures and Animations

Progressive Web Apps

As important as it is to learn native app development, I believe that PWAs are going to gain traction in the future. The beauty of PWAs is that you can build a responsive web app using React and turn it into an installable (via app shortcut) app on both Android and iOS phones. If you use a good UI library that support responsive components out the box, it shouldn't be too hard to convert into a PWA. As far as I know, an additional web manifest file needs to configured to make it installable. I have a client that wants to contract me to create this kind of web/app experience for his business, so I have a lot of motivation to learn PWAs.

I will be using this blog post as a roadmap to my learning in 2021. It's very exciting but also overwhelming at the same time. I hope I come out of 2021 and much more diverse developer than I was at the beginning of 2021. Learning should be a life long pursuit and I hope we all can pick up a few new skills this year that will benefit us in the future. Happy Learning! 👊.