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2021/01/03 #

cat << EOF > Web development technologies bucketlist for 2021

It’s the start of the year, so what better way to start the year than to make a list of technologies I’d like to learn and get experience with over the next 12 months:

Frontend

  • Vue & React - I have done a bunch of tutorials for both of these frameworks and I’ve read the docs, and lots of blog articles, so I’ve got a good idea how they work, but I haven’t had a chance yet to build or work on a full sized production application using these
  • Figma & Sketch - I’ve concentrated most of my web development on backend technologies, and most of the frontend work I have done has been using vanilla javascript and JQuery, with quite a lot of Bootstrap to get the UIs looking reasonable, so I’d really like to learn the basics of a design tool so as to be able to create wireframes and mock-ups, these two appear to be the most popular at the minute
  • Web components - I’d like to build some UIs using the platform’s component framework, so that I can build robust UIs that will last many years without needing much refactoring and upgrades, I have a good idea how they work but haven’t had the time yet to build real world production apps that use them, so I don’t yet have a good sense of when they are the best choice for a frontend project
  • Electron - In the context of web development it's a frontend technology because it would be communicating with a NodeJS backend, but it doesn't necessarily need to connect to a backend, it would be awesome to be able to create Desktop apps

Backend

  • Elastic search - The text search I’ve done to date has been using the features offered by the MongoDB toolset which work alright, but for really great search, which is something most websites need, the best technology in town appears to be elastic search
  • Kubernetes - Though I’m interested in serverless for some tasks/scenarios where it makes sense, I like to self host applications, usually on standard Linux VPS servers, however the new technology in town is clearly Kubernetes, which solves a lot of the infrastructure provisioning, and workload assignment challenges in a way that can be multi-cloud and well integrated with CI/CD systems
  • Raspberry Pi - I’m super interested in the internet of things space, this could be just as a hobby initially, but I think these is the potential for a lot of interesting web development work in this space, I also have some long term pipe dreams of creating a hardware product at some stage in the future, Raspberry Pi seems like a great place to start

I might add some more if I think of any in the next few days/weeks. If I do I will post the update to the linkblog which you can follow using the RSS Feed.

Happy new year and I wish you all the best for 2021! #

Today’s links:

  • GitHub dark mode - I missed this earlier in the month, I’m testing it out, it’s pretty coolwww.techradar.com #

  • How the BBC World Service migrated 31 million weekly readers to an isomorphic react app - Pretty great writeup from the engineering team about their migration from a PHP monolith, it’s cool that they are running server rendered React now, they do a lot of great work when it comes to accessibility since their sites are published in so many different languages and are optimised to run in a huge variety of network connectivity conditions, I’d like to know more about the backend the new system is using, something the article doesn’t cover, did they change backend language? They mention it’s running on cloud infra, but where? And are they using serverless?medium.com #

  • bbc/simorgh - Github repository for the BBC's open source ReactJS single page application - Used across the BBC World Service News websites, with tens of millions of users, these are some of their biggest websites - It's written in javascript and runs in NodeJS!github.com #

  • Moving BBC Online to the cloud - The engineering team writeup of their recent move from on-premises infrastructure to mostly cloud based where they are using serverless technologies extensively - Very clear articulation of the project high level goals, a description of the layered approach that enables code re-use but also keeps the flexibility to create custom specialised solutions, the re-organisation into teams focussed on page types and common concerns such as development methodology and hosting, interspersed with lots of development principles and guidelines - I have worked on several big projects at the BBC, it’s a staggeringly large organisation, so I am aware of how massive an undertaking this re-architecting of their infrastructure must have been, kudos to all the teams that made it happenmedium.com #

  • 🚀 New Blog Post: Web development technologies bucketlist for 2021 - Getting this year’s blogging ball rolling, making a list is a good way to startblog.markjgsmith.com #

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