Skip to main content

Web Technologies I Need To Learn More About

I like to think I'm a good web developer. Getting here was the result of experience, practice, and constant curiousity. Lately, I've wondered if the passive nature of that curiousity has run its course. The pace and breadth of changing technologies as a web developer can be both breathtaking and overwhelming at times. What do I need to know about WebAssembly, WebGL 2.0, or the differences between Browserify and Webpack?
Do I need to know about any of them at all? How do I learn enough about each just to understand if its something I need to understand even more deeply?
Beginning an effort to make that ever driving curiousity more directed, here's a list of things I don't know enough about, but would like to study better.

Webpack

I know that Webpack can replace Browserify and recently have understood it may replace some (or all?) the ways I use Gulp today.
I don't know if the change would impact more projects beyond the build scripts or how much time or effort would be involved with the change.
I want to know what solid advantages Webpack would bring other than just being "new and shiny". I'm specifically interested in how Webpack can handle non-Javascript assets, and how this might make it easier to isolate collections of componenets that pull in both behavior and styling together.

Redux

I know redux is a novel tool for managing all the data in a React application in a single store, focused on immutable operations that enforce consistent operations on your data to make testing and working with your componenets supposedly much easier.
I don't know some details about how to use Redux, like how to combine multiple components from different sources if they have to share a single giant store.
I want to know if I can introduce Redux into projects without creating a huge learning curve for teammates that may have less interest in the whole ecosystem than I.

Material UI

I know that Material looks clean (at the very least I know it doesn't just look like Bootstrap) and that Material-UI provides an implementation via React and could give me a big boost getting started on building larger applications.
I don't know if Material-UI's reliance on Sass would impose a requirement on me, which might be a problem because we've been a Less shop for years.
I want to know how easily we could use Material-UI as a basis to build collections of styled components for each project, especially how much we can customize Material widgets, build more complex widgets out of them, and style them without mucking with the original Sass.

Web Workers and Service Workers

I know that Web Workers and Service Workers bestow amazing new abilities to web applications and I know a little about the lifecycle of a worker and its communication with the host page.
I don't know anything about Service Workers, other than their building on the foundation the Web Workers laid out.
I want to know more about using Service Workers to control offline support, caching, and optimizing page load times. I'm especially interested in using them to get a handle on long load times on mobile and for larger, complicated Single Page Applications.

Sass and Stylus compared to Less

I know that Less has served me well and been my preferred CSS precompiler for a long time, but that decision and the environment it was made in was a half a decade past. For the same reasons I needed to evaluate and focus on one options then, I need to do the same thing now that the landscape has changed.
I don't know if the comparisons I made between Less and Sass five years ago are still valid today. I don't know how Stylus, the new kid on the block, measures up between them. I don't know if my preference for Less is holding me back because, despite what I'd prefer, its definitely the least popular and the move of Bootstrap from Less to Sass might be a nail in the coffin.
I want to know what might have changed about Sass and how it compares to the evolution of Less over the last few years. More so, I want to learn about Stylus. In the end, I want to figure out if either Sass or Stylus are improvements enough to be worth the effort and pain of jumping ship.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

CARDIAC: The Cardboard Computer

I am just so excited about this. CARDIAC. The Cardboard Computer. How cool is that? This piece of history is amazing and better than that: it is extremely accessible. This fantastic design was built in 1969 by David Hagelbarger at Bell Labs to explain what computers were to those who would otherwise have no exposure to them. Miraculously, the CARDIAC (CARDboard Interactive Aid to Computation) was able to actually function as a slow and rudimentary computer.  One of the most fascinating aspects of this gem is that at the time of its publication the scope it was able to demonstrate was actually useful in explaining what a computer was. Could you imagine trying to explain computers today with anything close to the CARDIAC? It had 100 memory locations and only ten instructions. The memory held signed 3-digit numbers (-999 through 999) and instructions could be encoded such that the first digit was the instruction and the second two digits were the address of memory to operate on
1 comment
Read more

Statement Functions

At a small suggestion in #python, I wrote up a simple module that allows the use of many python statements in places requiring statements. This post serves as the announcement and documentation. You can find the release here . The pattern is the statement's keyword appended with a single underscore, so the first, of course, is print_. The example writes 'some+text' to an IOString for a URL query string. This mostly follows what it seems the print function will be in py3k. print_("some", "text", outfile=query_iostring, sep="+", end="") An obvious second choice was to wrap if statements. They take a condition value, and expect a truth value or callback an an optional else value or callback. Values and callbacks are named if_true, cb_true, if_false, and cb_false. if_(raw_input("Continue?")=="Y", cb_true=play_game, cb_false=quit) Of course, often your else might be an error case, so raising an exception could be useful
1 comment
Read more

How To Teach Software Development

How To Teach Software Development Introduction Developers Quality Control Motivation Execution Businesses Students Schools Education is broken. Education about software development is even more broken. It is a sad observation of the industry from my eyes. I come to see good developers from what should be great educations as survivors, more than anything. Do they get a headstart from their education or do they overcome it? This is the first part in a series on software education. I want to open a discussion here. Please comment if you have thoughts. Blog about it, yourself. Write about how you disagree with me. Write more if you don't. We have a troubled industry. We care enough to do something about it. We hark on the bad developers the way people used to point at freak shows, but we only hurt ourselves but not improving the situation. We have to deal with their bad code. We are the twenty percent and we can't talk to the eighty percent, by definition, so we need to impro
4 comments
Read more