What technologies/frameworks/libraries interest me?
This post is inspired by a tech youtuber by the name of Ben Awad. At the start of each year he has a video that talks about the technologies that he was planning on learning. I thought it would be interesting to reflect on what I might be interested in learning in 2022.
Angular and TypeScript
I feel like the two go hand in hand with each other, since Angular (and not the no long supported Angular.js) requires you to use TypeScript. During a web development bootcamp I took while working at Northwestern, the frontend framework that was taught was React. While React seems to be the most popular framework that is being used today, I was never a fan of JSX. I also like the fact that Angular is a more opinionated framework than React; I like the fact that there is clear direction on how things need to be set up or written. TypeScript seemed to grow in popularity the past few years. While TypeScript offers all the features that JavaScript offers, TypeScript is a strongly typed langauge where you are able to declare types for you variables. Some advantages that people point out are that it helps catch bugs and helps with code readability, just some simple reasons to try my hand at TypeScript.
D3.js
D3.js is a JavaScript library for creating interactive data visualizations using HTML, SVG and CSS. While working at a research lab I mainly used R (as is most common in the scientific community for data analysis) to analyize our data and create tables and charts for publication. I find it pretty facinating that I could take my skills with web development and apply them to my biology background. When it comes to bioinformatics communicating findings through data is a core component. I feel like with D3.js, it might be able to open new pathways into data science and bioloinformatcs. There are a ton of very cool different ways to display data with D3.js, including maps, trees and more that are interactive and bring the data to life.
Just a couple examples from the D3 site:
https://observablehq.com/@d3/hierarchical-edge-bundling/2
https://observablehq.com/@d3/vector-field
Swift
I’ve already talked about Swift in a previous blog but I felt like I couldn’t keep it off of a blog about technologies I wish to learn because Swift is the number one new thing I would like to learn for 2022. Mobile software development is something I’ve had an interest in since taking CS492 here at OSU and I’ve been drawn to iOS development. I like that with Swift you are able to build native apps for iOS, watchOS and macOS and felt that it would open more doors than Flutter and Dart currently can. Luckily for this project we are able to create an app with Swift and gain experience with Swift, Xcode and storyboards/UIKit. I would like to explore SwiftUI as well on my own as it does seem like Apple is pushing for it to be the future over UIKit (just as Swift replaced objective-c as the primary language of iOS development).
