Sunday, November 18, 2018
I've finally gotten my weeknights back and I'm now planning out how I use my free time. It's interesting, because I'm slowly working things out to get there, but I'm doing it in a way where I enjoy it and it doesn't feel like work. This is partially due to the fact that I'm trying to create a stack that is going to be similar to the stack I use in projects at work, which should accelerate learning.
That's correct, I did. I didn't advocate for either way, but I was leaning towards Vue.js, because I thought it was pretty cool and I got up and running pretty fast with it. Instead, I abandoned that and decided to go all in with Angular. Not AngularJS, Angular. I looked at this briefly before and I came across a bunch of things like the Angular CLI, Webpack, TypeScript and it just sounded like a lot at the time. I then went through the tutorial and I was pleasantly surprised. I've noticed that the Angular team is really good at creating tutorials where they tell you only what you need to know to get their example working and why they are creating things the way they are. They are also opionated about how they do things, but do offer options to deviate from their suggestions. They will of course tell you that they warned you and that you should have a good reason for deviating from a standard practice.
No. They're different, that's all. I do like Angular's tutorials better. They pretty much tell you everything you need to know to get a basic CRUD app going, which is pretty much what everyone is going to do at the very minimum. I also had previosu experience with Vue.js and feel like that made me less afraid of Angular, because npm was no longer foreign to me. Also, I'm now using it at work, so I see it more often and it looks less and less intimidating.
I wouldn't say code scares me, but when I jump into something new, it seems overwhelming to learn something completely new, like TypeScript. TypeScript in this case is pretty awesome. I didn't have that opinion, before I started using it. Once I started using it, it seemed more and more like I was coding in C#, which is the point of it. Using Visual Studio Code also helps as well. It's such a great IDE for front-end projects and I was surprised to learn that a lot of developers that don't program in the Microsoft ecosphere use Visual Studio Code.
The point is that I've bought into this framework, so this week I'm going to figure out how to deploy this on Azure and get some basic CI (Continuous Integration) going with Azure DevOps. It looks like it's pretty cool and the price (free) is right for my needs.
I'm going to start actually working on my first app idea. Once I get that going, I'll provide a link.
I'm working with Angular, I like TypeScript, and I should have some basic app with no functionality deployed on Azure via Azure DevOps by next week. If you're curious, My stack is Angular, ASP.NET Core, and MongoDB. This will be hosted on an Azure Shared Windows environment. Of course, this could change, but it probably won't.