Things I've been into this year, so far...

I really just wanted to write a quick blog post and unload; talk about the technologies I’ve been into and what I’ve been mixing together so far this year.

In the first week of January I bought a couple courses on udemy; one was the Docker Mastery course, another was Master Jenkins CI For DevOps and Developers and two others were react native related.

Docker I’ve recently finally cracked open, and it’s pretty awesome. I’m not too far into it yet, but really can’t wait to continue down that completely different path for me. The Jenkins course was definitely a nostalgia buy, I was lucky enough to work with a very very good team of devops in North Carolina (i didn’t know at the time how good they were), 4 years+ ago, and they had everything automated to a T! Legit how agile product development should be, along with the company itself practicing Holacracy, if you’ve never heard of it, read up a little bit about it if you’d like.

All that is fine and good, great breaks to get away from Expo / React Native for a while, but that has really been my focus still, I was all gung-ho about writing about my process as I learn more and more about React Native and my findings, then I just got too overwhelmed, because I wanted to have nice tutorial repos on github to support them… But all of my code has been in this one React Native app i’ve been creating for the past couple months now. It’s just intoxicating, I’m in love with this framework and what Expo brings to the table…

This leads me into my Expo talk, this tooling built around React Native has made life so much simpler. Then once I heard about this Expo worker EvanBacon and his exploration into pulling javascript gaming frameworks (phaser, pixi) into expo… it was hard for me to not want to switch gears and work on that… after I reached out to him and got expo-phaser working on my machine, I was able to follow along from my web implementation tutorials of phaser and it just worked… even the tilemap, definitely a space I want to get back to, but for now, I’ve got to stay focused. I still think it’s good to switch gears every now and then but on the same token, there is so much cool stuff coming out, you really have to pick and choose and dive in. You can’t keep jumping around and never really learning anything.

And to add just a little more… I continue to work with the ever impressive Lumen for use with my native app. I know, it might be considered old school now? But it’s insanely fast right now, rpm benchmarks are good, i’m fine with it. Okay, that was it.