React

Part of the job description for the job I’m slowly making my way through the interviews for is front-end development. It’s technically a “Full Stack Software Engineer” position. While I feel comfortable with the backend, I need to brush up on the frontend beyond the basics of HTML/CSS. This means javascript. My favorite book on programming Dan Nemeth, Kevin Hoffman - Cloud Native Go Building Web Applications and Microservices for the Cloud with Go and React puts it nicely:

We can only hide behind the elegant, pristine walls of our Go ecosystem for so long. Once we step into the morass of the JavaScript ecosystem (perhaps mosh pit would be more appropriate), we must get down off our high horse and set aside most of our hardline stances on consumption of third-party libraries, code cleanliness and elegance, dependency management, and simplicity.

In short, JavaScript is a hot mess.

[…]

If the crisp, clean, elegant world of Go is a tidy workspace, the world of JavaScript is a clutterstrewn desk replete with spilled coffee cups, unidentifiable stains, and a potpourri of stale odors that may never come out of your clothes.

I’ve put off learning javascript for too long so it’s time to dig in now. I’m starting with a tutorial that was featured on the front page of HN today, Learn React Fundamentals which has a folder within the project that contains code you can edit and displays on the react application tutorial. So it’s a pretty nifty way to work on code and immediately see the results on the page you’re learning from. After this, there’s a slew of books (including the aforementioned Cloud Native Go) that I’ll be working with after this.

So far I’m on lesson 7. There’s so much changing with React though… In lesson 6 there’s a method called componentWillMount() which is in this new tutorial but will be deprecated in an upcoming version of React. On reddit when searching for “good react books” there’s a lot of comments that say things like “anything published 6 months ago are already outdated.” A lot of this is gatekeeping and flexing but there’s never been technology I’ve researched that has had those kinds of responses.

Movies

The Gospel According to St. Matthew (1964)

A classic biblical movie about the birth, life, and death of Christ, directed by the Italian Pier Paolo Pasolini. According to him he meant this to be a look of the story of Christ through the perspective of 2000 years of mythalization. All lines of dialogue are pulled from the bible.

Things I’m Liking

• Stealing the Enemy’s Urban Advantage: The Battle of Sadr City: A nice write-up about urban warfare in 2008 in a suburb of Baghdad. I never realized how important something as simple as concrete was for the war effort.
• A small notebook for a system administrator: A concept for a notebook laptop made for sysadmins in the spirit of the thinkpad. It’s just packed with features that would be so fun and practical: A tripod mount on the bottom! A power supply with visible voltage indicator! An arm mount! Video input for the laptop screen! Ports galore including VGA, HDMI, serial, ethernet, and microphone! Of course this is just a concept drawing but I was salivating while reading it. In the 0.0008% chance that this was manufactured I would buy it in a heartbeat.

Misc

I’ve narrowed down my trip in the coming week to two places: Hefei, and Wuhu. The former is a big boring transportation hub (I’ve heard “The Cleveland of China” before) but is bound to have something to see. The other, Wuhu, is much closer to Nanjing, being a small city an hour or two south of where I’m living on the south side of the Yangtze River. My goal is just to get away from Nanjing without breaking the bank, so one or both of these places should be just fine. I’m still debating if I want to go during New Year’s (and deal with the insane crowds in the transportation hubs – Remember this will be the largest human migration in history!!) or afterwards.

I’m writing this in Mann Coffee since my usual place of Asir Cafe is closed for the holidays. It’s a much more upscale place with coffee twice as expensive and a smoking section on the upper floor. A table of two girls just knocked over a lamp with a loud crash as one of them was putting on a coat.