(Bi)Monthly Reads: February - March 2017

It turns out I kept being rather lazy reader (and author, too!) for the whole 1st quarter of 2017. The spring has arrived hand in hand with fresh motivation to broaden my skills. I would distinguish the following pieces of knowledge from the past 2 months:

REWORK (book by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson)

This best-selling business book has an uncommon form: it’s a series of short (1-2 pages long) essays accompanied with bold, full-page illustrations. The content is very straight-to-the-point, which makes the book a very quick read, and very motivational one. Although REWORK tells nothing about software development, I found the advices suitable for all of my planned internet affairs, from the organizational side.

JavaScript New Year Resolutions Countdown (article by Eric Eliott)

Although the 2017 is 3 months old now, I feel some points from this list should go to my New Year’s resolutions. My thinking about need for soft skills was confirmed, and from technical point of view the most important topics would be using TDD and learning Redux, which both are novelty to me.

Top JavaScript Frameworks & Topics to Learn in 2017 (article by Eric Eliott)

The same author and very similar situation about the new-year timing. I somehow feel that “explosion” of new front-end libraries and techniques slowed down a bit (but it can by my recent information blindness), so I’ll have a chance to grasp something new and important.

The fine part of the advice is to know your language better before any tooling or framework. There are still ES2015 features to learn! On the other side, Eric says that Angular2 and React simply pay - so every week not practicing any of these frameworks seems like a waste.