I Am Enjoying Learning Web Development Again
I haven’t been up-to-date with web development since about 2006 or so. I’ve continued writing code this whole time, and in my day I was pretty cutting edge. But now I’m rusty and confused by most things happening in the space.
But over the last year or so, and especially in the last few months, I’ve dived back in. I work at a really awesome startup called Replay.io that is making amazing tools for developers. We let you record your webpage and play it back later in a visual debugger. It’s great technology, and it’s my job to make it great to use. And part of that is understanding the space deeply.
So after hearing about React for nearly a decade, I’m actually building things in React. After tinkering around the edges in GitHub for nearly as long, I’m actually committing real code to a real project. This weekend I made a site in Gatsby, started to understand GraphQL, and read the documentation for JSX. I’ve been geeking out over Tailwind and challenging all my old assumptions about best practices from 2006.
And I wanted to take a break to realise how cool all this is. The space has changed a lot in all this time, in wildly helpful ways. But the most exciting thing in that I’m learning hard things again. Learning anything new — anything at all! — puts your brain into a different space. Challenging assumptions makes you a better person. Staying curious makes life fun.
