ticketea got acquired by Eventbrite, and I got promoted to the shiny title of Principal Engineer, aka "keep working on tech stuff without managing people". Same (but bigger business), similar tech stack (Python, MySQL, Redis), different day to day work. While still doing mainly backend, I'm learning ES6 and React to also break Javascript stuff. And doing some tiny architecture proposals and misc tasks. Too many NDAs so not talking much about work for the time being.
Not many talks, as a consequence of the work confidentiality and working at internal/unreleased projects, it is hard to find a topic to talk about. At least I got to do some cool stuff and gave a final ticketea-branded talk about MyPy before the acquisition.
Visited USA (Nashville and San Francisco) and UK (London) this year thanks to work.
Working hard on improving english now that I some days talk more with humans through videoconferences than in person.
Got to play a little with reinforced learning, nothing major but enough to now desire to go deeper. As usual, depending on free time and priorities (I have at least one personal project I'd like to go forward with before).
Read a few books, listened to lots of podcasts and lowered noise by reducing Twitter usage to only shoutbox + replies and doing a huge cleanup of RSS and other news sources. Quality reading and time spent matters a lot.
Changed approach to videogames: Less games at once, way more focus on each. Also built a Retro Pie system and stopped getting angry of Linux emulators breaking now and then.
Having some time blocks to do personal experiments. Also helps getting up 1h earlier for studing/reading.
More sad family issues (younger cousing passed away).
Focusing a lot lately on improving and enjoying personal life, family and pets. The dog is now healthy as ever but now one of the cats got sick. Sadly the social part is lagging behind but is on the radar to be improved whenever possible.
Another course from Udemy, another review. Master English: Improve Your Speaking, Listening, & Writing provides around 5 hours of content to improve your intermediate level. My small caveats or things to improve after going through it are:
As you can see, nothing major and content is good enough to be worth the cheap price.
Webpack is a tool so widely used for React applications (including at work) and keeping at bay the Javascript tooling madness, that I wanted to also learn how it works, and avoid mistakes I made in the past like ignoring grunt and then having a bad time just working locally with simple SPAs.
This Udemy course includes around 5 hours of nicely done diagrams and code walkthroughs and demos so that we can learn quite a few things about Webpack. It not only teaches the tool itself, including quite a few gotchas and basic plugins, but also extra plugins listed for Babel, automating script bundles injection into index.html, chunk-hash into filenames, bundling CSS & outputing them as single CSS file (vs inlining), React & Redux specific setups, and advices like code splitting based on React-Router routes.
It is really well explained for somebody who has his/her Javascript obsolete (like me), and if anything, the author goes sometimes a bit slow and over-explaining, which is good for beginners. You can watch some portions at 1.5x without problems and still get everything.
After the broad topics, there are sections for developing with and deploying both static and non-static websites, some deployment examples (although all of them with utils so don't expect a detailed AWS S3 deploy) and explains how to use webpack middleware for Express (uses Node & Express as the backend server for the non-static website).
Considering it is a tool, so at least for me a topic that can easily get boring, it covered everything I expected, plus some extras you might find or not so interesting.
After a basic React course, I went on to learn some Redux, and chose again a Wes Bos course, both because I really liked the React one and because not only is free but also encouraged by the author to be taken just after the React one.
Learn Redux is a 2.5 hours course in which we'll build a simple Instagram clone by using React, React-Router and Redux. We learn how to use reducers, stores and connectors, reading initial data from some instagram JSON dumps but then operating with React state (using stores).
Again feels like magic how easy and simple everything feels when it's well explained. You can't beat the price, but still I think was more than worth the time to do it. Probably there are lots of advanced topics but I think I now kow the basics to build React SPAs.
I'm now going to work in a project which involves lots of frontend work and, as we use React, Redux and ES6, I need to hone my Javascript kung-fu, which has not been used extensively since 2013 (meaning "used on a daily basis for prolonged periods of time"). I got really good feedback about this course and decided to give it a try.
React for Beginners is an online 5 hours video course by the great and funny Wes Bos. By building an online single-page application to manage fish inventory and create orders, we get taught the basics of React: Components, JSX, state management, props, modules... plus other interesting topics like how to deploy a React app, some ES6 features, using the Redux Chrome developer tools extension, how to work with Firebase (the backend used to persist data)...
I not only think it is a great course (it even felt short and I watched the 29 videos version!), but the way it is explained (clearly, with clean and understandable code, and full of tiny tips here and there) and even the funny author comments when he makes a small mistake or the small error debugging sessions make it a great resource to start working with this technology.
Definetly recommended.