Developing Upwards

Today’s the second day of the first month of this new year. I decided to go ahead and do a sort of Fresh Start writing on this new year, even though it isn’t strictly the first. It wasn’t by design, but I like the laid back attitude of that because its part of my focus. I want to look forward to the year and I want to set some goals, but I don’t want to set myself up for letting myself down. That’s new years resolutions can so often do and I’m not going to do any of them. I’m happy to see my wife taking a similar approach because we’re so often on the same page. I’m going to lay out my thoughts about both this month and this year. Maybe the month thing will become a Thing I do more regularly, sort of checking in on the directions I’m taking. My January Expectations I’ve taken two weeks off for the holiday, so my energy for work is at an all time high after such a great break. This is leaning my attention right now towards things work related, both officially and unofficially as...

I’m really excited about ReactJS. I’ve let my tentative excitement grow for a while now, with a few experiments and tutorials and lots of reading. There is a strong habit of Shiny New Thing syndrome in the web world, and I’m as guilty of it as anyone else, so a lot of effort was made to avoid jumping on the bandwagon too soon. After building my first simple but complete application with ReactJS (and Flux) I’m absolutely convinced it is the best option for me to build web interfaces going forward. To share my excitement and to preserve my thinking, in case I come back in a couple years wondering how I got started with ReactJS, I’m going to outline all the reasons I’m so excited about ReactJS. ReactJS is Fast in Every Way That Matters Saying a software library is “fast” is often a red flag for not having a holistic view of the trade offs. Faster than what? Fast by what measurements and under which conditions? I can say that ReactJS is fast because I’m not saying one vague thing, but sayi...