My list of technologies to learn or deepen in 2021

The downside of writing one article per day on this blog is that I use time in my day that used to be dedicated to discovery, experimentation, and learning new technologies.

I don't regret anything, writing, sharing knowledge, and readers' feedback bring enormously to my personal fulfillment.

But the goal for 2021 is therefore to find some time again to deepen my knowledge of certain technologies and certain tools, whether for my job as a web developer, or for my general understanding of the IT ecosystem.

This list is both a personal memo, and also a way to give you ideas of things to study if you have free time and if it interests you!

Note that I already talked about some of these technologies in my article entitled "The evolution of my technical stack from my beginnings to today".

Typescript

From what I remember, I started contributing to projects in Typescript since 2019, so I'm comfortable enough with the language to write code, but my mastery of the subject isn't perfect yet and I don't yet have the reflex to use it for my new projects, so I'm going to try to fix that!

Link to the Typescript site

Storybook

Storybook is a tool that makes it easy to manage a library of web components, explore them, and test them in isolation.

This technology has been catching my eye for a while now, but I haven't had the chance to set it up yet!

Link to the Storybook site

PostgreSQL

It's been several years since I switched from MySQL to MongoDB for my various projects, and in hindsight I've come to understand that ultimately quite few projects really need NoSQL as their main database.

The goal is to go back by default to a relational database system, and according to the back-end developer community, you shouldn't miss out on PostgreSQL, so that's an additional topic to study.

Link to the PostgreSQL site

Nginx

By deploying projects only through cloud hosting providers, you quickly lose your grip on system administration and self-hosting.

I would like to not only use Nginx as a web server, but use it as a reverse-proxy to host several NodeJS applications on the same machine and learn to master its load-balancing features.

Link to the Nginx site

Docker

I've taken part in several client projects on which the development environment was managed with Docker, which made me realize I should experiment with that on my own.

Link to the Docker site

Rust

I started my in-depth learning of programming with C++, and since then I haven't touched a low-level language much, and I have to admit I miss it a bit.

I recently came across an article by FasterThanLime entitled "A half-hour to learn Rust" and recommended by several experienced developers in this language, so I'm going to try giving it a chance!

Link to the Rust site

Arduino

It's not just Arduino but electronics and embedded systems in general that I want to deepen my knowledge of, because although I have the basics and am able to build simple systems, I quickly reach the limit of my abilities.

If you're interested, you can find my two articles related to Arduino:

• "Arduino or how to create your own electronic devices"
• "Building an open source white noise and mp3 player for babies using ESP32".

The goal is to manage to create more complex electronic systems and improve my deep understanding of the communication between electronics and software.

Link to the Arduino project site