Working from Home - Day 34

I got up and started getting ready. I looked up at the clock expecting to see a time somewhere around 08:30, except no clock. Tried the light, no light. Power was out. Checked the router, it is on a UPS but Spectrum does not function when the power goes out. Headed up to the bedroom window to find enough 3G to get a message out to work.

Decided to take my shower early today. I figured I would have to work through lunch to catch up after the outage, just skip the elliptical for today. Power was back by the time I was done in the shower. A little less than an hour for an outage that the co-op said they had no idea of what might be causing it. I felt sorry for the people in town that rely on Duke. They are just customers.

Lunch was a sandwich and an AWS webinar on DocumentDB. It was less gee-whiz than I expected. I did learn more than from the study guide so I would say it was worth the time. One of these days I will find an application that needs this kind of scale, until then I think I will stick with PostgreSQL.

I decided to upgrade my personal laptop today. I figured it would take awhile so I kicked it off after lunch. The upgrade was complete before supper. It even worked well. I have not figured out how to get the fingerprint reader to work yet but I am look forward to all of the new desktop features.

Spent most of today reading and trying out modern JavaScript. There is quite a bit that a few developers could do with plain old HTML and JavaScript to make a very responsive website. I am sure that some sites require a framework such as ReactJS or AngularJS but I also suspect that those projects are few and far between. Chances are that most applications do not need to be the next GMail or Facebook. For that matter, Facebook really does not need that level of sophistication if not for advertisements.

I have been in the consulting field for almost twenty years. I know that the latest framework looks good to hiring managers. My advise is to ask your senior developers what they actually use to get work done. Websites have changed in the past two decades. Mobile adds new dimension to creating an effective site: multiple screen sizes and latency.

The HTML standards have really helped deal with differences, just let the browser control the flow. Front-end skills require understanding the HTML 5 tags and Cascading Style Sheets. The tags provide semantics for the page, and really help screen readers make sense of the content.

JavaScript fills in the gaps, dealing with client side events and communication with the home server. I know that server side logic can be coded in NodeJS, it just is not my cup of tea. I was happy when Java added the Nashorn packages to the JDK so I could reuse pieces of JavaScript when needed. Sad to see it deprecated in Java 14. I may end up embracing NodeJS after all.

For a better desktop feel check out Ubuntu 20.04.