Here’s a list of a few things I’m looking forward to learning this year or otherwise becoming more familiar with:
AI Development
If there’s one thing I want to educate myself on this year it’s AI programming. I’m not trying to transition into the AI space, but I think it’s imperative to gain some level of familiarity with how to leverage AI in an app I’m building.
I do have a specific idea or two for an app that I’d love to try and build as a side project. I think it may be a cool product idea, but I need to learn more about developing an app with AI features before I can validate the idea further.
The incomparable Matt Pocock is working on a new AI course that looks pretty interesting (no ETA on release though).
Astro
Astro seems super interesting on a number of levels, but I’m drawn to it for a few keys reasons:
- It’s fundamentally designed to work with CMS and display content
- A ton of really smart people I respect keep telling me to try it out
- It reminds me of the Travis Scott song
It also helps that you can use just about any JS framework you’d care to use with it, which is conducive to my other learning goals (see below).
E2E Testing in the block editor
My testing experience in the block editor has been largely confined to unit tests. I’d love to have some interactive UI tests to help validate extensions to the block editor from my own code or a third party plugin.
Rust
Why? Because it’s blazing fast. Duh.
Rust seems appealing to me because it’s different from the languages I usually write and you can build just about anything with it (even an eCommerce experience in a terminal). For me, I’d love to build some cool CLI based tool and possibly write a Rust backend that I can use with React.
Python
I’ve been messing around with Python a little bit while building a Shopify App for a client. Most of the code is prompt driven (thanks Claude) because I don’t know Python. Python is a very handy language and used for all kinds of AI/ML applications and even Raspberry Pi’s.
Plus I’m planning on getting my daughter a Raspberry Pi computer for her birthday, so that doesn’t hurt 😀.
React Alternatives
I want to make it a point to build some things with Vue, Svelte, or Solid just so I can get some more experience with the recent versions of each. I’ve been working almost exclusively in React when I choose a JS framework for years now and I think it would be fun to explore a few other options.
Preact is also very intriguing, mainly because it’s way smaller than React. But I haven’t really built anything significant yet.