This is my first attempt to start writing and enter the world of tech blogs. “Cool story bro but there already 1000s of people out there doing the same”. Fine ok my story goes as follows.

As a person I have always been curious about technology which drove me to programming and software development. I have worked in several companies and I always enjoyed adding new skills to my resume. However, lately I noticed that I have reached the level where it is not about what the company can offer me but what I can offer to a company (my friends keep telling me that the amount of white hair on my head has greatly been increased! 😱).

Once upon a time, a wise manager I had told me that if I want to kickstart my career as a develop, I should start writing blogs. I found that this was a silly thing that people do on twitter in order to attract attention (I caught him a few times checking twitter while we had meetings lol). Sadly back then I did not see the benefit of doing that. What was I thinking!!! I have to be honest, I am not a person that likes copying others, but when I see something I find interesting I like giving it a try and if it works for me, then why not starting using it.

I recently got a new job in the fintech company called FairFX. When I saw the offer letter, the title was senior front-end developer. I come from a full stack developer background and for some reason I completely ignored the front-end part of the title simply because the word senior was mentioned in it. Before you say “who cares, it is just a title”, I will say exactly BUUUUT I felt that this is the right moment to start taking my career more seriously.

Ever since I joined FairFX, I have met some inspiring people that showed me some really cool things you can do as an active developer who cares about more than just a monthly pay-check. Ever since I saw these things I started asking questions. The amazing thing about the software development world is that people (most of the times) like talking about their findings and share information about some cool stuff they found and all that for free without expecting anything in return.

It was that moment that I said to myself “what have I been doing with my career before that!” (If you are reading this and we have worked together before don’t get me wrong). My number one question was about how do I keep myself up to date. I still remember that interview I had a few months ago where the interviewer asked me if I knew what the react team was up to in its future versions. I said I did not know and that is where I felt the interview had ended. Anyway, back to our topic, how do we keep up to date with what is going on. As you expect there is not only one thing you can do but several ones depending on what you prefer. The options were following the right people on twitter, newsletters, podcasts, medium articles and many more. The one that attracted my interest the most was about podcasts as I am the kind of person that finds it very difficult to concentrate and read articles.

I got a few recommended podcasts but my 2 favourite ones were Syntax and Darknet Diaries. I got so hooked with listening to podcasts that I even bought some proper wireless “over the ear” headphones. Before that I was always questioning why people have the need to put such a big thing on their head to listen to music while being in the bus, now I get it. Anyway, I really started loving these podcasts and I then found out about the React & Javascript trends of early 2019 which were Gatsby, styled-components and Typescript. I spent time playing mostly with gatsby as I am dealing with the other 2 every day at work.

I have to admit that gatsby is an amazing tool and I had a good use-case where I could switch my personal website using this library. One of the many super cool features of gatsby is the ability to easily add templated pages using markdown language and then use GraphQL to display them in the way that you want. It was basically something like wordpress (yes! I said it!) but with React where you can setup a totally acceptable static website and then deploy it using Netlify within a couple of hours. That is amazing and I found that many of the React celebrities out there use that library as well. New website with the latest super cool React libraries and the ability to start writing blogs just like that? I seriously spent more time trying to come up with a catch phrase for my website (I’m pretty sure I did a terrible job there lol) rather than actually developing it.

Ok now to conclude, my goal is to start writing such blogs more often. I am the kind of person that does not function if there is no challenge or deadline. This new world of latest news is quite exciting and I really want to do my best to keep my self up to speed. In my next blog I will talk about a web-crawler I am building that will notify me when a specific website I have been looking for a while will have an available appointment for me.