2018 — My Tech Year in Review

Wow, what a year. It’s felt unbelievably fast, and yet it was jam-packed full of new accomplishments and skill development. Here’s an overview of the technologies I’ve invested in over the course of 2018.

GreenSock

This has easily been the most empowering new technology I’ve learned this year. Animation has always been kind of a pie-in-the-sky thing for me, something I could envision but never build. But this year, a coworker introduced me to GreenSock, and it really clicked. In addition to smaller applications and a very well-received blog post, this technology has enabled me to launch a project that I’ve dreamed about for more than ten years. I expect to continue investing a lot of time into becoming more proficient with GreenSock to create increasingly interactive and immersive web experiences.

Angular

This was my first front-end framework, and it continues to be my go-to for front-end projects. I started the year still largely a novice, and now I feel that I’m quite proficient in Angular’s core concepts as well as some of the advanced concepts. I still have a lot more to master, and I expect to continue investing heavily in Angular until most of the framework feels second-nature to me.

TypeScript

I first had to work with TypeScript a little under two years ago, with only minimal JavaScript experience as a foundation. Those first few files amounted to horribly written JS with the word “any” sprinkled throughout. This year, I really dived into TypeScript’s robust feature set, and it became one of my favorite languages to work in. In addition to its default usage in Angular, I’ve used it in Node.js and React. I want to master TypeScript’s more advanced features, and continue to leverage it across a wider range of use-cases.

Azure

I’ve had to become very familiar with Azure this year, for both deployments and management. Now that Azure supports Linux servers, I expect to begin using Azure resources for more hobby projects in 2019. Azure Functions, Application Insights, Blob storage, and Azure’s hosted database solutions all factor into my project plans for the new year. I also expect to use Azure Pipelines for more continuous integration needs.

.NET Core

I started programming in .NET Framework some eleven years ago, but moving to be a full-time Mac user pretty much killed any interest I had in booting up Visual Studio. I do really like the C# language though, and I’ve been impressed by the increasing viability of the non-Windows-dependent .NET Core for server-side logic. It’s very likely that 2019 will be the year that C# becomes a major player in some of my projects again, via .NET Core and its ability to run without virtualization.

React

I determined a while ago that I want to become proficient in all three of the major front-end frameworks: Angular, React, and Vue. Having become familiar with best practices for core Angular development, I started to pick up some React in the second half of the year. I launched my first permanent React project in the form of my online resume. In 2019, I want to focus more on learning best practices and the “React way” of doing things, as well as better code style and proper state management.

Entity Framework

The first time I tried to use Entity Framework, I truly had no earthly idea what I was doing and quickly dug myself into a big enough hole that it made more sense to abandon it. Since then, I’ve learned a lot more about both Entity Framework and LINQ, the language extension that makes it accessible. Especially with .NET Core figuring to show up in my portfolio in 2019, most likely Entity Framework is going to be there with it.

Electron

As a person who has no real interest in building complex desktop productivity software, Electron provides a perfect solution for me to build utilities or other apps that are well-suited for a web view GUI. That said, Electron has also helped bring me Visual Studio Code, Hyper, and Postman, all development tools I have come to heavily rely on over the course of this year. It’s also provided me with a perfect solution for SG Dial Sim, for which cross-browser support and responsive design was going to be a huge pain. I’ll be learning more about what this platform can do in 2019.

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I’m confident these technologies will be important to the work I do in 2019, but I’m hoping to pick up some new skills as well. I want to become more familiar with using Node.js on the back-end, and I’m also looking to gain experience with unstructured databases like MongoDB, real-time communication libraries like Socket.IO and SignalR, and state management libraries like Redux and NgRx.

All things considered, 2018 has been a very productive year for me, and I can’t wait to get started on 2019!