Saw a recent video by Ben Awad where he outlined what technologies he wants to learn in this new year. So I decided to follow what he does.
What I Learned in 2021
2021 was my biggest year for improving my skills and knowledge of many technologies for the many many projects that I undertook.
Rust Lang
From the start of the year I had an interest in learning rust because of how important memory safe application are and everything connected to it. On top of all of that I really wanted to learn more low level languages, I already knew C# and C from previous years as that was the first lang I learned but wanted something more than that as C based code was only really useful for legacy codebases which are already being slowly converted to faster and safer languages. While I learned the basics around the syntax and memory features I never got around to actually code anything with it which truly unfortunate because I didn’t get the full hang of it or had a use in my current stack or projects I was interested in. So maybe this year I can write some code in this very cool lang.
Astro
This is a more recent find and learn but astro changed this entire website. For the 5th time this website got a rework this time with a new tool called astro. Astro is a website framework that allows components from any framework to be embeded as well as it being built on the idea of island architecture and partial hydration of components which lead to a really fast website. On top of this website I have plans to convert most if not all of my documentation sites to astro this year.
Svelte
Connected to astro is me learning svelte to write components for this website.
Service Workers/CF Workers
For one of my previous iterations of this website I decided to have a go at implementing progressive web app functionality with a service worker. So there would be caching and offline viewing of the blog posts while this hasn’t lasted into this site its given me the skills to use cloudflare workers. While I am using for so many different things from pinging fpsmath to being a handler of webhooks and proxying api calls. So many possibilities and this for sure is staying within my stack.
To Learn in 2022
Here is my short and not final list of things I want to explore this year:
Go Lang
Like 2021 I want to give myself the goal to learn a new language. This time with rust’s rival Go because of its simple syntax that I can pick up from C. Plus because of that simplicity I can write more optimized programs even if its not to the level of memory safety that rust has. Which just makes it really suited for me to write programs with it this year and excited to see what I can do with it. At the point of writing this I am already learning it.
Turbo Repo
Just like Ben, I too want to learn and use turbo in my future mono repo projects. It just looks so good to improve speed of development within these repositories.
Prisma and DBs
As I try to become more of a well rounded dev to improve the quality of all my projects which requires me to learn databases and ORMs as most of my projects are stateless applications. From what I have seen and read about prisma is that it really improves interactions with a database and code quality around it so that when I do require a database its less prone to errors with its great integration with typescript.
Manim
While I dabbled into using motion graphics and graphs in the last few videos I have made, I really want to improve video quality and explore more topics in-depth with better explanations through these graphics.
Computer Science
I am starting my computer science course for uni this year so on top of all these technologies I’m excited to learn all that comp sci has to offer to learn and improve my knowledge and skills.