Free to explore

I have usually felt that I was arriving late to technology. I had almost convinced my parents to buy our first computer by the age of 16. There was only one condition left, that was, I had to learn typing. I started my Msc in Telecommunication Engineering without my own laptop nor Internet connection. I remember those practice classes carrying 4 o 5 diskettes to store all of the work. Now I’m a Software developer and I have normally worked in well-established technologies, e.g. starting with MVC when it had been already around for a few years.

Last year I had the chance to work in Oslo, and I could assist to one of the greatest Development Conferences, NDC. Something changed there. I was surrounded by brilliant people talking about things that hadn’t even released, including Scott Hanselman talking about Asp vNext or Douglas Crockford talking about ES6. They were like Hollywood super stars and I was part of the show. Then I moved to London and the trend continued. My colleagues are brilliant as well, always exploring the cutting-edge technologies and methodologies, it is very easy to follow their initiatives and explore something new now and then. I can also go to meet ups where they talk about the latest stuff for free. One feels his mind free and ready to go where it wants.

Why am I saying all these? Sometimes our weekly work doesn’t satisfy all our needs, we have to stay focused in the backlog and create a working product. A lot of times we are involved in new projects and ideas, but some others we work in the same project for months in the same stack. Our world is changing so fast that the only way to keep track of it and learn more and more is to start projects on your own time.

A couple of weeks ago I applied for the London Marathon 2016. After the Malaga Marathon 2014 I didn’t feel that willingness to train, the training was so demanding that I almost forgot about having fun. Although I don’t know if I will get a slot until October, now it’s time to go back to training. At the same time I’m starting a new project, Back to training. The goal is to create a simple app where I can register my trainings, the actual goal though, is to explore new technologies and creating something on my own.

The project has just started and you can find the code in Back to training. Amongst others, I want to use ReactJS to create shareable components across the application, yet using Jest to do TDD. Maybe use the Flux architecture to keep track of the state and update the UI, while using Reactive javascript. Use Docker containers to deploy the application and use TravisCI for my Continuous Integration, together with Gulp for the task runner and little bit of JSPM for packages management. For the API, why not using the yet to come Asp vNext framework with C# 6. If something new appears on the way, why shouldn’t we try it?

I will post frequently about the progress and the things I learn.

Thanks for reading!