Hello World…again 🙃

I’ve been going back and forth with ideas on how to start this blog for a while. And when I say a while I mean a while. So it was a huge slap in my face when I got a bill in my email to renew my website for Level 3 Studios. The website was supposed to host all these projects that I was going to work on during my “free” time. The website was going to be a place for me to challenge myself with new technologies and frameworks. The website that hasn’t been updated since early 2019 😳.

What did I do all year????

I’ve been thinking about doing something like this for a while, and after the mess of 2020 I decided it’s finally time to get this blog rolling. Like many of you, I’ve searched the internet for answers to just about every developer question that can be asked like “How do you interpolate a string in…?” or “Efficient methods for filtering arrays” or “How to format a date into a …?” and I’ve ended up everywhere between Stack Overflow and Medium. Over the years I’ve told myself that I need to give back to these communities, since I’ve learned so much from them it’s only fitting that I share what I’ve learned for others as well so others can learn from my trials 🏅 and failures 💥.

For those about to rock 😉

The Goal 🏁

Personally, I prefer to learn by creating a more “real world” style of project that provides me the ability to try out new frameworks or test ideas in a more realistic space. I’m planning on taking the same approach for this series, with each project being based on a scenario that can possibly come from a real customer and with enough room for each reader to add their own features as well. I don’t have a set timeline for each projects release, since I thought it would be a monthly type of thing but based on my current pace it seems more of a quarterly type of thing before each new project is posted 😞. Who knows, I’ll try to get it updated more frequently, but with the scale of each project there is some time that I need between each to get everything all situated (pulling a Bob Ross here and doing a trial run of each project first to make sure it works 😃).

The Tools 🧰

I’m not going to say what specific tools you should be using, since there are numerous choices out there, but instead just say what types of tools you need to follow along with the series.

1. UI Tools 🖌 — For me I like to use Sketch since I’ve been a long time user and have a large collection of plugins that I use periodically. There’s other tools like Figma or Adobe XD just to name a few. Outside of this a good color picker comes in handy (I like Sip), especially when needing to deal with different applications formats. As time progresses you may want to invest in a icon manager (I like IconJar) and/or font manager (I like RightFont) to help speed up the design process.
2. Development Tools 💻 — Depending on which projects you want to follow you will need Xcode for Apple related projects, Android Studio for Android projects (there are others to choose from here) and Visual Studio Code for Web projects (there are some others to choose from here as well). For landing pages I like to use Blocs since it’s simple Bootstrap style makes it easy to get a landing page up quickly. Not so much a necessity, but depending on the type of projects you want to work on you will want to look into some database tools (I like TablePlus) and a version control client (I like Tower).

The Process 💡

I’ve found that not only does the Agile process work for the developmental life cycle but even for a design cycle. Going from wireframes to mockups to prototypes is a great way as a developer to approach the design process and get a better understanding of UI/UX practices in the process. For development work I usually follow the Model-View-ViewModel (MVVM) architecture since it works well with how I like to code and now combining it with Test Driven Development (TDD) gives me a modern approach to development.

Where to now 🤔 , I had at one point created a mobile app that had some similar features as what I wanted to do for the first project so I decided to pull that project down and reformat for this series. Each project will contain a native app for each platform (iOS, Android, and Web) which is being done intentionally for 2 reasons; 1. If you plan on learning just one platform then wherever you get a job I guarantee they will be using the native tools and not a cross platform tool, and 2. I don’t really like the cross platform frameworks 🤷‍♂. The first project should be done soon, so stick around if you want to see how some random developer tries to challenge himself to try new things 😄.