The simple act of looking back at the year and maybe even setting goals for the new year has always intrigued me. The problem is I sometimes just didn't do it. So, here is my review of 2024 with a focus on software engineering:
Nuxt 3 Course
It took some months, but in the end, all that counts is that I finished it: the online course Mastering Nuxt 3. I received a certificate and improved my knowledge of Vue 3 and Nuxt 3, which helped me to migrate old apps or create new ones. Vuetify was my choice of visual components library until this course; now I am just in love with TailwindCSS (plus component libraries like DaisyUI) as it provides balanced simplicity and easy extension. Also, it was nice to see how Supabase works as a database and auth provider, Prisma as a database ORM layer, and Stripe as a payment provider.
By the way, if you still prefer Vue's options API, please try the more modern and logical composition API. No mixins, just composables, and if you structure your code now by logic and not by type, it's just a dream to extract it into composables later on!
Talk at a Conference
Besides internal talks, this year was the first time for me to present a talk at a real developer conference. As I learned much about Flutter (and Dart), I tried to convey how useful it is from the perspective of a Flutter newbie. I know it could definitely be improved, especially the presenting part, but it is a step out of my comfort zone, and every step counts 👀.
If you have trouble with your Vue / React / etc. hybrid app, Flutter could be your solution. For me, using Capacitor to wrap a Vue application just didn't work out. Fixing both platforms is sometimes not possible, as one fix creates a new issue on the other and debugging multiple layers of frameworks is not a developer's dream. If you know React / Vue and Java, learning Flutter and Dart is easy and a worthwhile investment.
Homepage
I adore homepages that feel like they are made with love, so I started mine. It took a while, but the best thing to happen to me was the urge to upload my presentation sheets from the talk above. This motivated me to finish the first version of my page and finally publish it 🥳!
Many developers either keep their homepage as simple as possible, or some just exaggerate. I think I belong to the second group 😂. I chose the tech stack I was most interested in and which kind of suited my case:
Framework for frontend and backend: Vue 3, Nuxt 3, Nuxt Content
Language: TypeScript
Style: TailwindCSS, DaisyUI
CMS: Local Markdown files created with Obsidian and then exported
Hosting: Vercel
I can recommend this tech stack. It is flexible and has great DX, but it is not perfect. Some Nuxt modules just have their quirks, and sometimes the documentation is not correct. DaisyUI has many great components but sometimes it doesn't have enough options for me. Obsidian is a great editor, and I also use it for my personal notes, but exporting without errors is not easy, as it uses a non-standard Markdown syntax (I am using a rust script that does not get updated anymore…). These are all just some minor inconveniences, so just try any of them if you haven't!
Open Source Contribution
Giving feedback, testing betas, or creating Issues on GitHub is normal for me when it comes to open source software. This time, I had the (bad) luck to stumble upon a limitation due to efficiency while using a JavaScript visualization library. This caused me to investigate and fix the library, and to create a pull request (not merged yet, though, so I published the fork to npmjs.com). For me, this was my first time contributing code to open source software, and as a byproduct, publishing a package.
I am honest; it takes a huge amount of work to find a bug in a random project and even more to fix it. Also, to publish the package, I first had to write my own GitHub action, as the initial script was made for another platform, then find out that many people create a bot account to publish on npmjs and use a specific kind of token to access it from the action. Once all of this setup was done, it just worked, though.
Conclusion
In 2024, I achieved many things, and I am proud of that. The aforementioned points are not everything I've done, but they are a huge part of it. I am open to stepping out of my comfort zone again, and as every year, my motto will be "life-long learning".