September 2015 – Stephen Adams

Node training course

On Friday I attended a one day Node course by White October. This course was run by Tim Ruffles

It was a great course, pretty full on and fast paced. Tim is a great instructor, who really knows his stuff and was a great tutor.

When I started the course I knew a little about Node and some ExpressJS, but after sitting through the course I realised I need to learn a lot more about Node and how to write Node, especially the callback pattern. For what I learnt during the course, the callback pattern is extremely important to get right or your Node code can quickly turn into a right mess.

Here’s a good link to understanding the Node way:

The Node Way

I’ve also got a couple of books to read through:

So plenty to get through.

White October put on some good events. The next big event I’m going to is the AngularConnect conference in October

Signed up for the Creative Class

In order to help grow my freelance business I’ve signed up to Paul Jarvis course, the Creative Class

See how it goes….

How to Upgrade Node through NPM

With the new version of Node out, I decided to upgrade to the latest version of Node (version 4.0.0).

I didn’t want to go through downloading an install package, I wanted to use NPM so after a quick search around I found this way from David Walsh’s blog.

sudo npm cache clean -f
sudo npm install -g n
sudo n stable

It is fun to learn

I’ve just read Dan Davies article “It’s fun to learn” it’s a great article where he talks about how he is a self taught web developer and over the last year he has really pushed his jQuery skills building demo sites and projects. It’s a great post and well worth checking out.

While reading I was reminded about that initial fun you get when you start out learning new technologies. Like Dan I’m a self taught developer, who has picked up new skills as I’ve gone along. For me learning a new technology has recently felt like it’s something I have to do. For example as a contractor if I want to earn so much a day then I need to have a particular set of skills (not the set of skills that Liam Neeson has in Taken). Which has lead me to looking to pick up the next thing that is popular.

Really I have a lot of experience and a good set of skills, and I could easily stick with what I know, but this leads to stagnation and a feeling that you are going nowhere in your career. This takes the fun out of the job.

Dan’s post has reminded me to not learn something cause it’s popular and may increase contract opportunities, but to learn something that I find fun. And the best way to learn a new technology is to build demo sites as Dan lists in his post.

For me I’ve recently been interested in NodeJS (yes I know it is very popular at the moment, but it’s something I want to learn). As a web developer I like the web frameworks that Node supports, the one I am interested in is ExpressJS. So that’s what I’m going to start learning and have fun doing it.