And Now For Something Completely Different
January 21, 2021
Thursday -
Along with plodding along with this portfolio, I caught up on the State of CSS and JS 2020 surveys. They cover so many aspects of working in the industry but my favourite features are the graphics on heard of / usage and graphs of satifaction vs usage.
After reading, I definitely want to practise async/await and sets given they seem so widely used but I’m not yet familiar with them. I’ve been considering looking into Angular or Vue for a new project and if I was to go the graph alone, Vue is significantly ahead of Angluar in positive reviews.
On the CSS front, Sass, BEM and Styled Components are rated as the ones to adopt - happily these are ones I intend to focus in on. The stark difference in Bootstrap ranking top for framework usage while being low on satisfaction and interest, is a good reminder that popularity isn’t everything, and I’m interested to see if dropping jquery in V5 is going to help it rise up through those rankings again.
At Lunchtime there was a Northcoders hiring partner presentation. Alongside being a really useful insight into companies tech stack, team and company values I often leave them with something new to look into. This time I heard about the OWASP security top 10 - that’s my weekend reading sorted!
Friday - Welcome to the world of shadows
So mid-week I had the bright idea to try incorporate a Gatsby blog theme into my project. I had been writing up what I spent my day on to keep me focussed on working on new areas each days - but an even better level of accountability is needing to blog about what I’ve achieved in the week! Can’t be too hard to add in the blog theme, right? Cue a lot of failed compiles, mysterious links, and a lot of discontented muttering. But now at the end of Friday I think I have my head wrapped around it.
On the off chance dear reader you are an equally clueless new Dev about to go down the rabbit hole of Gatsby themes, these are some (hopefully!) useful sources I used.
The Gatsby Docs – Themes Tutorial & Shadowing Explanation
Docs of course should always be a first port of call, and the Gatsby ones are definitely some of the more comprehensive and clear ones out there!
This twitch stream demo from Laurie Barth @ GatsbyJS
This runs through a set-up much in the same way as the tutorial, but with a more in depth explanation as it goes. It is also a very healthy reminder that even established Devs (and one that works at Gatsby at that!) regularly run into bugs.
P.s You can definitely get away with setting the speed at 1.5 if 50 mins seems too long.
If you’ve read this far, I’m impressed! Have a good day!