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giekaton

Did a lot of learning in 2018.

Finally moved away from Wordpress as a back-end, which I pushed to the limit.

Learned Laravel and greatly improved my skills in vanilla PHP.

Moved from jQuery to Vue.js - it's now my default front-end framework.

Started using CLI and Git regularly.

Learned PWA, service workers, serverless, Web3, some Solidity, more MySQL, server admin, scaling.

Throughout 2018 I was coding all the time on my own, executing my personal projects. It was a great learning experience, and now I finally became a good and productive coder.

This is an achievement, because my first speciality is graphic design and I specialized in it for many years. Now I'm also a competent coder. When I combine design with code, possibilities are endless.

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Thanks for sharing. I have a very basic question. What is your favoured method of learning new technologies/languages, how do you make the most of your time and make it stick? I am coming from a different background and the learning is a completely different dynamic to what I am used to. I could ask this of most here but you seem to be particularly proficient at learning loads in a short space of time.

Hi, this is how I do it:

1. First I read some theoretical info about the new technology that I want to learn. It can be a book, documentation, or the information can be in a form of a podcast or a video. You need some theoretical background in order to understand the core concepts.

2. Then from my ideas list I pick a new project to work on. I then create some sketches, designs and start coding. As a new school coder, I mostly use google for answers regarding syntax, methods, patterns and general best practices.

Sometimes it works the other way around: I first decide on the project I want to create, and then learn the tech that the project requires.

I also closely watch the general tech ecosystem, and pick projects that allow me to learn new things, building upon the previous knowledge. In 2019 this will be less important, because now I have my skillset in place, so the main criteria for picking projects will be the project's potential for commercial success.

What did you replace Wordpress with?

Laravel or vanilla PHP backend.

But I'm keeping some of my projects on WP, and will continue to update them. There are many reasons why Wordpress is great. Just that now I'm free to use any kind of backend... In 2018 I also worked with Node.js and Firebase, but currently for the server side I prefer PHP.

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