Andrew Vo-Nguyen
February 15, 2021
3 min read
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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! 👊.