6 Resources that Designed Me as a Web Developer

This article originally appeared on dormoshe.io

Hundreds of resources about web development are published every day. They include lectures, presentations, screencasts, meetup videos, articles, blog posts, books, etc..

Usually, we choose which resources to review according to our skills set and our fields of interest. There are some resources that make us feel different after viewing/reading them. This feeling is hard to explain. It can be the understanding of issue we are trying to solve or something that wires up our points of knowledge.

In this article, I will present the resources that made me feel different, those that designed my web skills.

The Revolution of the Single Page Applications

SPA in 2017 is a consensus. It seems that it’s here from time immemorial. Master pages, full pages rendering and weak browsers were fading out, while heavy using of Ajax, stable browsers, less code, high performance and better user experience were fading in instead of them. It’s a revolution! Twenty years ago, nobody thought that the future will look like it is today. The browsers became a stronger component in the zone and are capable to be a safe place for heavy applications using SPA principles. All of this contributes to the establishment of JavaScript as a widely-used software language, even for the backend. SPA frameworks are predominant the web. Therefore, it changes the web architecture, the software courses syllabus and the high tech recruitment demands.

Why a Single Page Application, What are the Benefits ? What is a SPA ?_Let's start with the first question: Why Single Page Applications (SPAs) ? This type of applications have been around…_blog.angular-university.io

The Understanding of the Players in the Front-End Arena

Angular is a strong and widely-used platform, but there are more than 10 factors that deal with part or all of the problems that Angular trying to solve. React, Aurelia, Vue.js, Backbone, Ember, Polymer, Knockout… You can refer the “others” as frameworks, libraries or something else, but they all touch the same areas and offer solutions in different ways. A lot of articles trying to compare between them. It is true that some of the players are comparable (like Backbone and Angular), but it is almost always a mistake to do that between React and Angular. There are a lot of cases when the first is the best match and a lot of cases when the second is the best match. It depends on your project needs, developers, managers and, sometimes, even on your geographic location.

Choosing the Right JavaScript Framework for the Job_Perhaps you've had a chance to experiment with one or two of these frameworks, but are still a little unsure about the…_www.lullabot.com

Component-Based Architecture

SPA and JavaScript frameworks succeeded in entering to our life. MVC is a common architecture of a lot of applications, but something has been changed. In 2013, Facebook released the React library and redefined the way Front-End developers build applications — Component-Based Architecture.

A component encapsulates functionality and behaviors of a software element into a reusable and self-deployable binary unit. The architecture reduces the time to market and make the life of the developers easier. The code is more understood. It’s convenient to work on one application with more than one team. It’s more reusable, replaceable, extensible and encapsulated. Component-based development isn’t just the future of the web. It’s what you should be doing now, in any application on the web.

Component-Based Architecture_Software Architecture and Design Component-Based Architecture - Learn Software Architecture and Design concepts in…_www.tutorialspoint.com

The Announcement about Angular version 2 Formal Release

September 14, 2016, was the release date of Angular version 2. After about two years of waiting and a substantial number of alpha & beta versions, it come out and the fears and uncertainty in the community were big. A complete rewrite of a framework is not something that has been done every day and the existence of other competitors had stood up the developers in an inconvenient position. When the version was released, we follow the Angular core team announcements and the community started to publish articles and a lot of ways to learn how to build with the new version. We passed the birth process and we have been growing together to what we are today and it enjoys to be part of that.

The Rise of Functional Programming

Functional programming is cool! Nowadays, it’s very fashionable to use the expression “functional programming” (FP). My first meeting with FP was, of course, in my BSc degree in the university, but it was just one of the programming methodologies that was learned in the “Programming Languages” course. My first real experience with hardcore FP was when I needed to write queries in ReQL. ReQL is the query language of RethinkDB — a NoSQL database. It’s easy to write a code that uses the FP principles, but the needs to use complex queries in my work, cause me to understand the concept in a more significant way. The curiosity caused me to investigate and read about it and even to go to a meetup about it. FP is awesome, but you should use it only when it’s meet your needs, or when you just want to entertain somebody.

The Rise and Fall and Rise of Functional Programming (Composing Software)_Note: This is part 1 of the “Composing Software” series on learning functional programming and compositional software techniques in…_medium.com

The Power of Decorators

Decorators are one of my favorite features in ECMAScript. The ease of use and easy to build make them so popular. They are clean. They are simple. They are here to stay. Most of the developers use decorators, but they don’t know what it is and how to build them.

The first time I really met the decorators was when Angular 2 was landed. They looked at me, I looked on them and it was a love at first sight. They improve readability and reusability. You can compile them to ES5 with Typescript, Traceur or Bable. Decorators are amazing. You can use them and you don’t want to ignore them.

Decorators & metadata reflection in TypeScript: From Novice to Expert (Part I) * Wolk Software…_An in-depth look to the TypeScript implementation of decorators and how they make possible new exciting JavaScript…_blog.wolksoftware.com

Conclusion

The web is wealthy in what it can offer us as web developers, now more than ever. The free time is limited. So, you should think what do you want to know and what can improve your web skills. It’s interesting to think which of these references affect on whom and why. Those who affected me the most, I found by myself, but if you connect to the right bloggers, it can be enough.

You can follow me on dormoshe.io or Twitter to read more about Angular, JavaScript and web development.