Affan's Blog

Every year I always tried to do more productive and more productive. Today is near-end of april (when I wrote this post) and I wanted to share my learning list on this 2017. This post also works as target for me at the end of the 2017, so sit back and enjoy :)

ES6

Most of the time I am a web developer, so I think learning ES6 will do me very good since I work with JavaScript. When I learn it in the first time I was too confused because there are so many things that I must set up. From node js, to babel. It was so exhausting evening so I decided to drop it because I was so confused lol. But now as I see it, ES6 is a pretty solid to learn and I think it is the language of the future, like scala, go, and many other thing. Definitely on the top of my list.

Sass

The first time I found Sass is when I found RyanFitzgerald’s devportfolio-template. When I looking at the source files, I can see that he use Sass then convert it to CSS. I love the way he structured the Sass file and using so many handy shortcuts inside of it. And he provide an easy set up using gulp. I can just type gulp watch to automate the compiling Sass files. Love the variables lol. And I can change color to dark by adding 10% or something like that, didn’t need to re-type every single hex color.

JavaScript Frameworks

When I am doing web developing, I spend my time on styling so I usually work on CSS files. That’s why my JavaScript skill is so dull. I am planning to creating some JavaScript web apps by learning some JavaScript frameworks. I still didn’t know anything about it. But I heard a lot of good ones, like Angular, React, Vue, and many other things.

Status: Doing React Native now because I am interested in building Android apps

Django

Beside web developing, I can do Python. And there is a Python framework for doing web, so win-win solution I guess? :p I was shocked when seeing my friend create some web apps with Django. I think it is a management software for pharmacy. And I got hooked. So I will learn it and dive deep down with Python ;)

Ruby and ROR

I heard Ruby On Rails web framework is a great web framework. And Ruby’s name kicked high because of ROR. I see the Ruby documentation and cheat sheet and found that Ruby’s syntax isn’t too different from Python. So I think it will become a good programming language under my utility belt. Status: I think I will not do Ruby, because I want to focus more on PHP, Python and Javascript for web development.

PHP and Laravel

My friend (the same one whom created pharmacy software using Django) also learn PHP framework during his sparetime. And I learned PHP sometime ago and found it great! Also PHP is already a standard for websites so I can use it practically anywhere. After reading some forum regarding PHP. I found that PHP and CodeIgniter is the most popular one, and they said Laravel is like the newer framework than CodeIgniter so I should learn that. Though when I visit local bookstore, All I can find is CodeIgniter books.

C# (.NET) or Java (Spring)

Now comes to software development. The most popular one on my country is Java, but I still didn’t know about the one with higher job rates yet. I found Java more ‘portable’ because Java can installed on every machine so Java coder always said ‘write once run anywhere’. And then C# is Microsoft’s answer to Java, enough said :) Btw There will be Hackathon on my town a few month from now :) I’m interesting in join in. Probably I should learn this before that event coming up.

Well… That’s what is inside of my mind right now. I’m not sure if I am able to learn all of those by the end of 2017. But I will do my best :) Thank you for reading!

Happy programming!

2018 Update

Now it is 2018 and I will summarize how those list working out for me. Basically, I realized that I just cram a lot of these things in here and don’t thinking if it was good for me or not. Basically I drop almost all stuff on this list.

The “big one” on my list is to learn ES 6. I realized I don’t like web development especially JavaScript bit because of how fast it is changing.

The Sass one is kind of good news :) I learned it a little on Codecademy and able to do some stuff. And this very blog you are reading in right now is Sass based too. I don’t pursue web development that much anymore but this skill is pretty useful.

The JavaScript one is pretty good too! I learned react-native. I built an application in it. I got into national! Woohoo! That was thrilling, writing application with little skill I had on a skill that I just learn in 1 month. But it was a good learning experience! If I am still doing web development, I think I’d go for React route because I already did some stuff in react-native.

For Django. I don’t really know what to do. I drop web development for pursuing Python, and Django is the web development part of Python. I did create a simple blog in Django and it was fun, Django made that easy. But I don’t know about the hosting, though. When I learn web development, not only I can host it on my local machine, I also can FTP out and put my web on the server. But almost all free server is for simple website with JavaScript and PHP only. It is hard to find Python one, so I think I can’t focus on this part because of that reason.

I found that Ruby is just an alternative to Python. Both language is similar, so I would focus on Python only.

I still haven’t done anything for the software development part (C# or Java). They are a different beast altogether and it is really hard to get into them.

And that’s it! That’s what I’ve done these past 2017. So… in short, I dropped web development, I learn Sass anyway, I created an app in react-native, I dipped my toes in Django, I ignore Ruby, and I haven’t tried C# or Java at all. So…. kinda disappointing, eh? Still good for master procrastinator like mo, though.

Thank you for reading, see you on 2018 learning list!