Brief thoughts on React and Vue

I’ve been playing with React and Vue, getting a feel for what they can do and how they approach solving certain problems. While my knowledge of both are very surface-level at the moment, I’m leaning towards Vue’s approach mainly for one reason: pragmatism.

Vue doesn’t require any specific workflow or tooling, and it can work right out of the box with existing code and architecture. It also isn’t so dogmatic about data-binding as React is. Vue is very pragmatic – I like that. Makes it much easier to start using and working with.

Busy year… again

Another fiscal year at work comes to an end and wow It’s been another crazy, busy year. Lots of projects, lots of interesting problems solved (or ran into). Overall, very, very productive on many levels. On a sad note, I’m moving on from the Mac Pro – not for any technical reasons (it still works great) but for business management and internal systems and support reasons. I’m now using a very nice Dell Precision laptop for work. While I miss some nice tools and features of the Mac (and although I personally feel I’m more efficient on a Mac), the reality is in this day and age that you can pretty much do graphic design and front-end web development work on any Windows or Mac machine.

On the design front, I created some well received designs for some content web sites, web applications, and even SharePoint. Nothing earth-shattering but some very happy clients with nice, modern, usable sites.

It was also a crazy, busy year on a personal and family level. We’re still recovering from a freak storm that damaged the house (power ripped out and had to get replaced and siding damaged). Then we have a bathroom that needs to get repaired (the shower/tub wall tiling started to leak). And during all this we were expecting our 3rd child. Kid #3 finally came 3 weeks late but healthy for all that. Special thanks to all the friends, family, and neighbors for their support and help both with the house and the baby.

So that’s been my crazy year so far. More to come I suspect…

Tested and Certified

So work (yeah work!) paid me this week to go to training, take a test and get certified with Microsoft’s Programming in HTML5 with JavaScript and CSS3. The trainer was excellent. The material was, as per most technology training, a bit out of date. Not like horrendously bad out of date, but definitely some material that is deprecated or where there are better methods now days. The training used Visual Studio 2012 and IE10 for studying – which just helps illustrate the point of the material being a bit out of date. Anyway, this now means I can add “MCPS: Microsoft Certified Professional” and “MS: Programming in HTML5 with JavaScript and CSS3” to my resume.