My Current Skillset

I was introduced to the digital media industry via graphic design work on Photoshop. Wanting to display this lead me to development and building a portfolio website. Since then I have focused on the development side of things and found a real passion in finding digital solutions via websites, apps and web apps. My preferred area of Digital Media is Web and App Development.

My time at University has allowed me to lay a solid groundwork in web development through a series of varying projects. The first year saw me build upon an already existing knowledge of HTML & CSS. I used my time to grasp a good understanding of PHP and JavaScript which enabled me to develop my first dynamic website and saw me interact with my first API. It also highlighted the importance of database design and normalisation.

The following summer fortunately provided the perfect opportunity to build off the programming fundamentals of first year. I dived into frameworks that’ll speed up the development time and functionality of projects - specifically JavaScript’s React and Python’s Django. The beauty of my university course is its small size - this however means it is necessary to have a well rounded, full stack, approach to projects which is why I felt it necessary to accompany my React frontend with a backend like Django.

This knowledge put me in a great position for my second year. Allowing me to use what I learnt in React to create a cross-platform app in React Native with a scalable back-end api. Allowing our client to edit what information is displayed in the app with CRUD technology and allow users to login and sign up with user accounts.

Why React?

I believe that investing the time into learning React and its ecosystem will really be rewarding for me in terms of all the areas of digital media I want to get into. React is a JavaScript framework created by Facebook. It is a flexible and widely used library for building user interfaces. It is largely based on a strategy that allows reusing the code when required via components. There are three main front-end JavaScript libraries I could have potentially chosen: React, Vue and Angular - they all work in a very similar way. React was the second most broadly used web framework of 2019 at 31.3%, behind jQuery at 48.7% (Stack Overflow Developer Survey 2019, 2020), also React and Vue are both the most loved and most wanted web frameworks by developers, while Drupal and jQuery are most dreaded - 74.5% of developers who are developing with React have expressed interest in continuing to develop with it (Stack Overflow Developer Survey 2019, 2020). This immense community behind the framework in conjunction with the news that “Microsoft recently announced at Microsoft Build 2019 a MIT-licensed, performance-oriented re-implementation of React Native for Windows... developers may target a large variety of Windows 10 devices such as PCs, tablets, laplets, Xbox, or Mixed Reality devices.” (Couriol, 2020). React Native allows us to develop for a huge line of different devices natively - and with Microsoft fully adopting the React Native ecosystem and even redeveloping Office to be partly powered by React Native (ReactWindows, 2020) I don’t see the framework going anywhere anytime soon.

Goals

Over the past year I have found a love for React, which has complimented my front-end development journey as a whole with websites, apps and web apps. I was also able to learn Django to round off my projects and become more of a full stack developer. I want to be able to gain some new skills and improve upon my knowledge going into and during my final year. I made this list at the start of May so I have managed to make progress on some and also added more!

  • Develop React websites and applications to the latest trends and industry standards. Specifically,
    exclusively using functional based components with hooks instead of class based. ✅

  • Look into GraphQL and Apollo ✅

  • Learn Gatsby.js - static site generator using React. Uses GraphQL to pull in data from APIs, headless
    CMSs, markdown files etc. ✅ (this site is made using Gatsby!)

  • Learn Next.js - used to render server side React applications

  • Learn Node and Express (I recently bought this book by Frank Zammetti for this!)

  • Learn TypeScript ✅

  • Look into Deno and Svelte

I'll check back in every couple of months to update you on what I'm up to and what I'm going to attempt to learn next! As I delve into Node and Express etc I'll write articles on what I learn and how I find it all, I'll also go into why I want to look into Deno and Svelte so keep a look out for these!