Site: https://in30days.dev
Build:
Welcome to my in30days.dev site. This started off as a place to showcase some of the #30DaysOf projects I had worked on, as a Developer Advocate at Microsoft.
But it is evolving into two goals:
- A place for my personal journeys into learning new things with a goal to acquire some level of mastery ont hat topic in 30 days.
- A sandbox for my exploration of the Astro framework for building static web sites.
My software development background spans a number of programming languages, network layers and technology stacks, over a span of 20+ years. I consider myself a generalist with an context-driven specialization mindset.
In other words, I've worked with a sufficiently wide range of technologies and topics to be conversant with best practices and usage. But I also realize that knowledge becomes rusty without applied usage - and there isn't enough time in our lives to be up to date on everything.
Instead, I use active project deliverables or personal #30Days journeys to give myself a contextual goal and deadline to refresh past expertise and acquire new skills on a continuous basis.
I am inspired by Tim Urban's Life In Weeks - which emphasizes that our lifetimes are finite and the units in which we divide that time is key to helping us set and achieve measurable goals to make that life more fulfilling.
Learning something requires more than a week - a month (30 days) feels sufficient to go from basic understanding (core concepts, quickstart) to advanced usage (best practices).
The purpose of this site is to organize things I've learned (potentially over different periods) into structured #30Days roadmaps for two reasons:
- give me a personal milestone in tracking progress
- build a reference I can use to recall concepts when needed
My three primary areas of interest over my career have been distributed systems, mobile & ubiquitous computing and web & cross-platform app development. Of the three, the web domain moves fastest, with new tools and frameworks emerging on a monthly - if not weekly - basis.
In 2021, the Rising Stars of JS helped me identify emerging frameworks - notably Next.js, Astro, Docusaurus, and Nuxt - that I wanted to build expertise on. And the best way to do this is to have a concrete project to work on.
I've used Docusaurus a great deal recently - and currently plan to rebuild my personal site with it, giving me a sandbox for long-term exploration and expertise-building.
I'm using Astro for this site, for the same reason. It gives me a concrete project to go from basic quickstarts to having a sandbox to explore ideas (and document them) with a real-world target.
I have a couple of Next.js and Nuxt.js projects in the works that I hope to reveal later - but enough about motivation. Time to go building. 👩🏽💻