Always be learning

I've been a Developer for 15 years and one thing that I've always focussed on is to always keep learning.

From starting as a self-taught Developer, initially learning HTML and CSS, to later learning PHP and Drupal as well as other languages, frameworks and tools.

For the last couple of days, I've been experimenting with Next.js - a React-based web framework. I hadn't used React before and have typically reached for Vue.js or sometimes Alpine.js based on what I needed to do. However, I'm always looking for opportunities to learn and implement new things, and see how I can use them in any of my projects.

This afternoon, I started a new Next.js and TypeScript project, and refactored a small codebase that used a static site generator to create a small number of landing pages from Markdown files.

It took me a short time to set up a Docker environment for it based on some of my Vue.js projects, ported across the application to recreate the pages, and finally, updated the CI pipeline that generated the static pages and uploaded them to an S3 bucket.

The end result is the same - the same HTML pages are generated and uploaded - but, for me, trying and experimenting with new things keeps my work interesting and my knowledge fresh, which benefits me as well as my colleagues and clients.

As I said in a previous email, one of the great things about software development is that there's always something new to learn.