I decided in the New Year to revisit writing the blog as once upon a time, I really used to enjoy writing about what I do and what I wanted to do and as part of that was to look back at old posts and see how things have gone in the years since.
In the time I’ve had the blog, I’ve talked about process, workflow, things I’ve learnt, things I’ve wanted to learn, observations about myself and the web industry but over time, opinions can change and so can the technology we use so I thought it would be interesting to see if my opinions are still the same and are my goals the same too. I’m not a massive technical writer as to be quite honest, I shy away from it as there is always someone who is cleverer than me and wants to prove it but that’s probably my issue to get over and just post stuff but in the sea of blog posts, it’s probably not a huge rush to do so. What I can write about is my own personal experiences as a developer and designer and someone trying to get on in the digital world.
I noticed something back in 2015 when I moved into a Magento role that I stopped writing as frequently as I stopped being what I would call a traditional front-end developer and became a Magento front-end developer where maybe the focus was more on the platform rather than the skills and process around the discipline which for me didn’t warrant writing about to a wider non Magento audience. One of the drawbacks of working with a platform solely is you don’t maybe get to work on new technology or skills but that’s why God invented side projects which is something I’ve done for years and will always do. I get a lot out of doing them and not just the skills I learn.
Reading back through the blog, I’ve seen a path I was going down and now I see me going the opposite route in terms of what I want to focus on in terms of skills. Last year for me was massive when CSS Grid was put in front of me. For me hands down, it had made designing and building websites fun again and I think will change a lot of people’s way of thinking. When you look back through the blog, you’ll see me talking a lot about learning javascript. Since I started to learn, I’ve seen Angular, React and many other things come in and whilst I still want to learn these things, my focus is elsewhere now and I’m ok with that. But don’t worry, it’s still there on some list.
A lot has happened from the start of the blog to now so it will be interesting if things improved or went to shit.