Oh, hi there! Well… it’s been a while since I last blogged, so let me explain…
Since my last post, a few changes have occurred in my life that affected my ability to write. I started a new job at Facebook, relocated to London, began a new relationship, got married, left Facebook/Meta to travel “the world” for almost two years, and finally relocated (again) to the US.
During my five years at Facebook/Meta, I felt I had little of interest to write about. Most of my work was deeply integrated into Meta’s specific infrastructure or wasn’t suitable for public discussion. Over the last two years, as I traveled, I didn’t engage in any technical work—as you can imagine, prolonged traveling consumes a lot of time and mental resources.
After two years away from anything technical, I found myself missing it. I felt an itch to code again. Moreover, after five years at Meta working with a very bespoke tech stack, I realized I had lost touch with the latest developments in the coding world (can someone explain to me how to do stacked commits in Git?). For most of my career, I’ve worked on enterprise back-end and desktop clients, which often meant sticking to a specific tech stack with limited opportunities to start greenfield projects or learn something completely new.
Thus, I decided to start afresh, go back to basics, learn new things, and write about them.
Since I was never a web engineer, I never had the tools to easily build an idea from scratch, so I’ve chosen web development as my starting point to build upon. I’ll need to learn a lot about the technologies I missed while working in a walled garden, and maybe dip into the new AI developments that everyone is so excited about[1].
TypeScript seems to be the language of choice[2], and I have a feeling I might adopt it as my general-purpose language for all my projects, fulfilling the age-old quest of using one language for both front-end and back-end. VSCode appears to be all the rage for IDEs[3]. Of course, there’s GitHub (re-learning source control is always fun), but what about everything else I took for granted: package management, containers, web frameworks, web design, authentication, testing, mocking, E2E testing, continuous deployment, hosting, fallbacks, databases, ORM, proxies, error handling, analytics, dashboards, feature flags, etc…?
Obviously, I know working on a fun project is not the same as the real thing with a team of engineers. But I do like being organized and thorough.
Finally, since one cannot learn without doing, I have a few projects in mind:
- Handle OneDrive photo upload timezone mishandling (rage post to follow).
- Migrate this blog from WordPress, inspired by “If You Are a Programmer, Do Not Use WordPress.”
- Create a modern web-based toolset for “From Nand to Tetris.”
We’re going on an adventure![4]
Cheers,
Arthur.
- According to StackOverflow full section on AI ↩︎
- According to the StackOverflow technologies survey ↩︎
- According to StackOverflow, Integrated development environment ↩︎
- From Adrian Tchaikovsky’s “Children of Ruin”. Highly recommended sci-fi. ↩︎
The Art of Dev 