Things I want to learn in 2021

Getting creative

Last year, I took up learning how to use brush pens and got a bunch of art equipment for my birthday and over Christmas.

I'll be continuing with that as 2021 rolls on, particularly learning more about calligraphy. It's a satisfying hobby, but takes a lot of practice. Watching videos on Instagram does nothing for your confidence but gives you a lot of inspiration.

Originally, I planned to take on my second Project 365 and take a photo every day but with continuing (and repeating) lockdowns in the UK, it's going to get very boring very quickly. My next plan was to start doodling every day, but that's not been possible... the idea was to spend 5 minutes a day drawing the same item each day for a month. There's plenty of time in the year to catch up, so I might put some effort in to do that. No point giving up on a perfectly good plan if I'm still just a few days out.

That covers my more creative side, what I really want to do is refresh what I know about web development.

My #dohackathon submission was a real eye opener. I learnt a lot about platforms I had not really had the chance or desire to look into. I learnt more about git as a source control solution and I surprised myself by finding I needed to learn more about the development tools I've used for years.

Hotwire

At the end of the year, @dhh announced Hotwire which looks like the front-end framework I've always wanted. It took me a second to understand the logic behind how it works but now that I've got that, I really want to find a project I could use this for.

For me, progressive enhancement was how websites should be built. The landscape has moved on a lot from when I first got started. Things are client heavy now and in some cases, there's a lot of sense behind it but it's always frustrating to see the wrong tools being used for the wrong purposes.

Server Side Rendering (SSR), is something I can get behind but it's not quite how I see the web working. Hotwire solves that problem and is very lightweight. Turbo, the bit I really like is around 12kb transferred and less than 50kb unpacked.

CD/CI

I've practiced Continuous Deployment / Continuous Integration for almost a decade now but it's not something I've applied to personal projects very much. I use scripts to take care of push the code out, but it's not ideal... I should either build an interface or employee a tool to take care of it all.

Git

Git isn't something I've had to jump into very much. I've used it here and there over the years but never for a personal project until last month. It's not something I have to change, but it's something I should explore.

1. Opens up my options for CD/CI
2. No longer need to look after a SVN server
3. Explore more of what Git has to offer

I'll have to evaluate a few solutions and maybe the outcome might be that I stick with SVN or that there aren't any real benefits for projects I'm looking after alone... I'd like to see out the year knowing exactly where I sit with this.