During these pseudo-lockdown days of COVID, I have a lot more time on my hands to scratch itches, build those things that I thought I would enjoy building, learning how wrong some of my assumptions are, and how occassionaly, something beautiful comes out of it.
Ever since March 2020, I've learnt to build a few new categories of app that I thought were out of reach. Things that the start of lockdown I only imagined, but now are real things.
- I've learnt how to build fairly complex Vue apps.
- I've learnt how to build React Native apps, how good the tool chain is, but also how much they suck at the last mile.
- I've learnt how to build Swift UI (and how close they are conceptually to React, Vue.)
- I've learnt how to use TensorFlow and Keras to train my own recognizers from scratch.
- I've learnt how to use TensorFlow JS and TensorFlow models to build web-browser face detectors.
- I've learnt how to use Google Cloud AI to build WhereCam.
- I've learnt how to use Google Cloud Storage (and not to use it for high throughput writing.)
- I've learnt how to build authenticated server-less web and iOS apps using Firebase Auth.
- I've learnt how to how to automate a lot of things using Google Cloud Functions and Cloud Scheduler.
- I've learnt how to build complex Webpack projects (and moved my whole website on to it that deploys on a Github push.)
- I've learnt how to programmatically use Google Spreadsheets to drive a few projects (covid19japan, snowm.app).
- I've learnt how to use Tesseract to do PDF parsing for COVID tracking.
- I've learnt how to use d3 pretty effectively to make maps.
- I've learnt how to use Three.js to render some cool mountains.
- I've learnt how to use Firestore, Firebase Auth and Firebase Storage in all sorts of cool ways.
- I've learnt how to build and publish an npm.
I've learnt a lot in the last 18 months, and when we do finally come out of lockdown, I'm going to miss this.