Many times in the Software Engineering trade, we feel like we are treading water to stay afloat. The problem with this is that treading water takes too much energy and we will eventually run out of power. Here's a few tips to make the journey more efficient.

Stay Laser Focused

As web developers we owe it to ourselves to narrow our studies. Today these are the best three to focus on.

• React or Next.js
• The cloud
• GraphQL

React

React is by far the most popular due to :

• Facebook
• Speediness
• Easy learning curve
• JSX
• GraphQL
• A massive adoption with plenty of GitHub projects
• A robust Stack Overflow community
• Plenty of jobs

Learn everything you can about React but put emphasis on its newer feature named Hooks. Everything in React is free! The library, videos on You tube, Examples everywhere, and even Visual Studio Code which is a wonderful IDE for React, JavaScript and Typescript.

Cloud
We just learned recently that Azure has taken over AWS for Cloud revenue. I personally prefer Azure and study it daily. Start first learning Serverless/Microservices architecture. Why? Because it will eventually render full blown back-end legacy architecture obsolete. There's no reason any longer to host our own back-end and call those endpoints instead of our new Cloud Function Endpoints.

There's too many good things about the cloud. We must stay focused on learning all we can "in the cloud".

GraphQL

GraphQL is an industry database disrupter. It's a query language for JSON and JSON is the best database option for web applications. So we are obliged to follow this trend. Create an Apollo Server and host it as a function in Azure to see for yourself.

Just these three items will keep us plenty busy for the next year. Start on it now, and don't look back. Stay laser focused and motivate yourself until you are totally comfortable with these three things.

JWP2021