Learning Goals, Revised

These are the technological tools I’m currently focused on learning as a newsroom developer. Some of them I know decently well, at least in relative terms, some are very early doors.

The list is by no means exhaustive, and there’s no need to use them all, certainly not at the same time. One can form multiple pick-and-choose stacks here to do just about anything, from lightweight practice projects to entire startups.

Quick feedback loops, declarative syntax, a comfortable high-level abstraction with capability to dip a level or two closer to the hardware when needed; those are some top metrics I evaluate these things on. It’s a practitioner’s approach.

The tooling areas are listed in a very rough order of priority. That is to say, building user interfaces ranks higher than mastering bundling tools for me right now. Yet the process of parsing and optimizing the code I write for browsers to interpret is also something I feel I need to understand better to build software in a more durable manner.

In short, my big things for 2022: serverless architecture, 3D presentations, data journalism.

The most recent list of tooling focus

• User interfaces: React, SolidJS
• Static sites: Astro
• Dynamic web apps: Next.js
• Serverless backends: SST, AWS CDK, Supabase, tRPC
• 3D visuals: Three.js, react-three-fiber, Blender
• Data:
  1. Organizing: DynamoDB, FaunaDB, Planetscale
  2. Visualizing: D3, Visx
  3. Wrangling: pandas
  4. Caching: React Query
• Hosting environments: AWS, Vercel, Netlify, Cloudflare
• Fundamentals: HTML, CSS, networks, data structures
• Bundling tools: Vite
• Command line: bash/zsh, jq, zx
• Languages to explore: Rust, TypeScript/JSDoc, Go
• Styling: Tailwind CSS

Update log

May 5, 2022: Some wording tweaks, link updates.

July 9, 2022: Swap Remix for Astro for less overlap with Next.js. Added Supabase, PlanetScale, tRPC. Taking out old version.