It’s been awhile since my last blog post and I haven’t had much to update since. I felt like a year end post would be nice to summarize what I’ve been doing at work, what I’ve been learning and what I am looking forward to in 2023.

I’ve hit my two year mark as a software developer at Coveo and learned a ton. I developed a ton of new features at work, learned a new framework library (Mantine) and overall, I feel like my debugging skills have improved significantly since my first year of working at Coveo.

I started to understand the data fetching patterns that we do to communicate with our backend; utilizing the Swagger API and how to use our resource API to fetch data. More importantly, I have more experience in debugging network calls, and look at how data is passed from the front-end to back-end when developing new features.

In addition, this year, I took 2 VSCode courses because I’m a nerd, and took a Git master course to improve my Git workflow and learn how to be more efficient with it. Overall I’m super happy about the courses and learned a ton of new Git commands that I now use daily and share with my co-workers.

Recently, I purchased an Educative.io subscription because I want to become better at understanding TypeScript. I understand the basics of TypeScript and how it integrates with React, but lately, when working with pure TypeScript, I noticed I don’t know much about it and what other benefits it can bring.

On top of that, I am looking to learn data structures and algorithms, system design and I am looking to explore their React with GraphQL course since I know that this tech stack is becoming more and more popular. This is something I want to learn to keep my skills sharp.

Previously, most of my learnings were through videos, but lately I found that I have very little energy after work to sit down and watch videos with content heavy material. With Educative.io, they realize this is pain point with video tutorials and thus, have all of their content text-based which are short and well summarized in digestible bits of information.

Another course I’ve been taking recently is the Level Up with React Query. I’ve seen multiple articles mentioning the use of React Query and would love to dive into this library.

I might use this for another upcoming project and having to understand what this data-fetching library provides for React will be super beneficial for learning new tech and deepen my knowledge about web applications.

Side Hobbies

This year I purchased a small little Dell OptiPlex to create a home server. Lately, I’ve been having a lot of fun configuring Home Assistant and automating my devices at home and diving into self-hosted applications running on Docker.

My raspberry-pi is running Pi-Hole to block ads which have opened the door to understanding DNS and networking which has been frustrating and also rewarding.

I picked up the book "The Way of Kings" by Brandon Sanderson while I wait for Pierce Brown’s next Red Rising book and have been enjoying it so far. Hopefully this will keep me busy up until May of 2023.

Summary

Looking to leveling up my skills with:

1. TypeScript
2. React with GraphQL
3. React Query
4. Exploration of Zustand for React (because this looks super cool)