Learning New Tools

It’s been pretty good lately, on the coding front. At work, there’s been a push for us to start using Angular. And after a few sessions and tutorials, I’ve started to work on a personal/side project with Angular – building, practicing, and learning a lot in my off hours.

In doing so, I’m also diving a bit into Gulp, and learning about how to automate part of my workflow. And this also led me to start working a bit more with the command line, and finding myself more comfortable in that space.

The challenge with front end development is that it’s just ever changing. I got complacent back when I first learned Flash, and my main mistake was not keeping up with technology – not staying relevant. Lately though, I’m feeling like I’m keeping pace… at least on the tool front. There is, at times, an overwhelming feeling when looking at all these is to know and learn. But at the peripherals of that feeling, there’s a lot of excitement, a lot of possibility.

I guess this post is just something for me to look back to, and marks a specific moment where I’m really enjoying learning new stuff – for both my job, and for my own ability to make things. There are a lot of things I’m working with now that, I think, maybe a year ago I would have found overwhelming.

I don’t know that I’d classify myself as a good developer. I know I’m much better than I was, a year ago. And I hope to be better in a year’s time than I am now. Learning and using new tools seems like a step in the right direction, and I’m generally feeling excited and good about what I’m learning. Feels like progress.

// Edit: Although, I did lose several hours this past weekend due to accidentally including Angular twice in my project. Couldn’t figure out why things were firing twice, and overlooked the most obvious of reasons for an embarrassingly long time. Tools only help so much, sometimes.

Related:
Code Day
Long Days, Coding Days