Overview
I want to oultine quickly, the things I did and did not learn in 2022, and what I plan to add on to this come 2023. The idea, like other people have noted, is highly inspired by the series Ben Awad does every year.
2022
This year I made a lot of progress in learning web development. Overall, I think I built upon prior knowledge of frontend development, and improved my understanding of backend architectural patterns (monolith vs microservice).
Largely consisted of learning about the following:
- tRPC - used for a bunch of small projects, probably my favorite tech I worked with; drastically improves development speed
- Microservices - took a course based on microservice architecture; really interesting and look forward to continue learning
- Next.js - went more in depth on its capabilities
- Docker - used it for the course mentioned above; makes a lot of annoying things less annoying, and will continue to use it
- Golang - learned the basics and built the backend for AppTrack
- SvelteKit - tried a bunch of times and decided to give up and wait for V1.0 (which I will try now that it's out)
2023
For 2023, the majority of my goals are to continue building with the tech I liked working with in 2022, namely tRPC, Next.js, and Go.
I'd like to focus on the following:
- Golang: I'd like to continue working with Go and get much better with it. Having not used it since creating AppTrack, I'm definitely rusty, and need to get back up to speed. Working on a Go project or two would be great, and learning about features I've avoided my first time around, like goroutines, is what I'd like to do.
- Elixir: I've been wanting to learn Functional Programming stuff for a while, but it seems to be quite a commitment to learn and fully understand so I've put it off for a while now. I know that Elixir is a fairly popular web service language, so I think it would be cool to mix it into a project in the form of a microservice at some point.
- SvelteKit: As I've mentioned above, I gave up on SvelteKit a couple of times already. Seeing the 1.0 release and all the features that come with it is really intriguing. Having used Svelte here and there in the past, along with Sapper, I'd really like to seriously work with SvelteKit at some point. Integrating Svelte with tRPC seems like a near perfect fullstack workflow for rapid development.
- ** GraphQL: This is a huuuge *maybe*, since tRPC kind of does a lot of the things GraphQL seems to fix, at least for a small dev team (likely just myself). Nonetheless, it's been hot for a long time at this point and I'm yet to even look at it, so maybe I'll try it out if I'm feeling inspired.
Concluding
I mainly want to work on more projects that I, and hopefully others as well, find worth using. Improving AppTrack, and making improvements come next Fall is one of the main things I want to do in my free time, and I'll find time for other projects as well.