In the short-term

I’ve been reading through The Complete Developer: Master the Full Stack With TypeScript, React, Next.js, MongoDB, and Docker by Martain Krause. I’ve been taking a bunch of notes on it, and publishing them to my JavaScript GitHub repo.

I’ve also been considering using a site like CodeWars (or possibly CodePen) to try and work on my JavaScript skills. I haven’t really decided yet.

In the longer term

I’ve been working through a bunch of different stuff. There’s a lot of things I’d really like to write on, but it’s been really hard to figure out what my focus should be set to, and where I should be devoting efforts to. Some of the big things I’ve been looking at are this:

• JavaScript
• WordPress themes / PHP
• Contributing to fakerJS repo
• Docker Compose
• Firewall rules
• SSH
• GitHub Actions
• Re-building the WordPress site (this blog) outside of Web Station

To be more precise

1. I want to get back into JavaScript for pretty obvious reasons, to myself at least. I want to be able to contribute back to my job a bit better. Postman uses a weird mix of in-house code and basic JavaScript. I’d like to be able to rely less on the Postman-wonk and switch to pure JS stuff. It also looks like the postman wonk uses old versions of stuff (like fakerJS, for example!)Aside from that, I feel like have a stronger knowledge of JS/TS in general will help improve my skill set for WebDev work. I’d like to be able to expand into Frontend/Full Stack work. That can’t/won’t ever happen if I don’t put in the footwork.
2. I’ve also been noticing increased malicious bot scans, so I’ve been trying to harden my firewall rules to be more resilient. It hasn’t been too crazy, since this site is essentially non-existent, but if I would ever like to be able to link to reddit, HN, etc. I should have things a bit firmer for the additional issues that will bring over.
3. The SemPress theme is fine as getting something basic/tame on the site, but it really isn’t very pleasant to look at, as is. I also don’t like the fact that it hasn’t been updated in a few years; I’d like to make a custom WordPress theme to improve my skills insofar as Frontend is concerned. I don’t mind if it ends up dipping in quality below what it already is; but I’d like for it to be my bad implementation, rather than a strange implementation that is also something that I cannot really update or rely on. (And of course, no disrespect to the maker of SemPress! It’s free, they don’t beg for money, and it doesn’t try to lock me into an ecosystem; that is already better than 99% of the stuff out there! I’m just concerned about whether something might break in a future WP update. I’d like to feel more secure in knowing how to fix it.)To be able to make my own WP Theme, I’m going to need to know PHP, which means more required learning.
4. Speaking of, I’d also like to end my dependence on Synology’ “Web Station” for site hosting. It works okay, but I don’t have full control over it. I appear to be forced into a specific version of PHP for some stupid reason. I’d like to rebuild using docker compose, and feel like I have more direct control/say-so over the version of PHP and which DB’s I’m using for it. That kind of stuff. The UI for Web Station isn’t that great either. It kind of functions, but not very well. So, if I don’t have control and the interface is jank…I might as well roll my own via docker.Besides that, Web Station also has serious issues trying to play nice with anything else on the reverse proxy. Web Station assumes that if it’s running, nothing else will ever be on 80/443 ever again. I had turned of a custom script I had built to get Web Station to be nice, and turned it off thinking it was no longer needed – Nope! Still very, very much needed. Ugh. It’s just very clunky and stupid.Even more frustratingly, the logging system that Web Station uses is just so terribly inadequate. I can’t filter and search the way I would expect to be able to. There’s just a lot to be desired. It’s very disappointing.
5. I’ve also been doing some stuff on GitHub in terms of building my own dotfile setup, .gitignore, etc. For ./github, I built an action to work with one of the repo’s I’m using during the weekdays, it will auto set the assignee and some other weird values when doing the PR, but I’d like to spread that across all of my projects.That’s also been an issue with Obsidian, too. Each time I build up a new vault (which I probably should stop doing, anyway?) it’s making a new .obsidian folder, which resets EVERYTHING, so I’ve got a bunch of similar setups with minor differences between them. For some, it would almost make sense, but I want to follow Zettelkasten, so I should probably only have one vault anyway. If that’s the case though, then I need to propagate that across the different repos and kill the bad ones. That also means getting the .git and .gitignore files inline, too, because some were using LF, other CLRF, some were tracking stuff like images, some weren’t. Some were tracking videos, some weren’t. I just need to get them all on the same page on so much different stuff. Ugh.
6. There’s also been a bunch of social commentary stuff from reddit posts and comments that I’ve been writing down. At the moment I have…55 drafts of things. I don’t want to contribute too much to social sites anymore. I’d rather just do my own thing and try to avoid having LLMs scrape my voice for their own personal profit. I get that eventually they’d probably hit this site too, but I’m hoping that if this ever gets to that kind of level, some kind of web standard to tell LLM scrapers to stop would have become standard and enforced. Perhaps legally, so? I don’t know. Probably wishful thinking, but a man can dream. At the very least, why comment on reddit, or wherever, when I can put that content into my own site, anyway? I doubt the people I’d want to rant at care to read it, and I don’t care to get a bunch of rude comments in return. So, why bother commenting there? Make the post in here, and then link it on there, or whatever.