Exploring the Next Chapter in My Coding Journey
It has been a very long time since I last posted on my personal blog—hopefully it won’t be the last. I wanted to give an update mainly on the development side of things. For a more general life update, I’ll make a separate post since a lot has happened since the last one, but you can also follow along on Instagram or Twitter if you want to see that sooner.
So why now? Why revive this blog? Currently I’m in my 13th year working in software development, but lately I’ve felt like I’ve been stagnating. I haven’t been using the latest web development technologies or working actively with modern tools. So I thought to myself: let me change that—especially after regularly listening to the Syntax podcast, which always piques my interest. This has led me to set and maintain a few goals for myself.
First, update this blog. It has been on Gatsby for too long, and I’m now in the process of moving it to Astro. Currently there are a lot of issues so please bear with me which is currently a work in progress.
Next, create some side projects I’m interested in. I have a lot of ideas, but with my current addiction to Street Fighter 6, I’m developing a simple Elo calculator in Astro. I started without a framework to practice plain JavaScript, but later I’ll create a React island so I can experiment with newer tools I haven’t used yet, such as Suspense and Server Components. There are plenty of other projects I’ve started—or want to start—but I’ll save those for a future post.
Lastly, and this might sound cliché, I’ve been working on LeetCode problems. The main reason is that I don’t feel as sharp with JavaScript/TypeScript as I used to. These days I rarely use them, working mostly with legacy technologies, and I feel like I’m forgetting a lot. Or maybe I’m just getting older too! Either way, I thought practicing LeetCode problems would help me recall language APIs I’ve forgotten. I’m also taking notes and creating Anki cards to make sure I don’t forget again. I may even create regular posts about the things I’ve relearned, which could be interesting.
This time it’s a fairly short post, but I’d like to write more regularly about development. I also used to get a lot of engagement when I wrote about life in Japan, so I may continue that as well—we’ll see. Anyway, thank you for reading!