New Year, New Side Project

Launching into the new year with a clean-slate restart of an old side-project that I got stuck on a few years back. I'd built it using Scala and the Play Framework, as was my preference at that time. The problem was, this "purely server-side" solution was simply wrong for this particular problem, which would be far better served being entirely client-side (this will make more sense when I release it!).

Thus, the 2019 reboot of this project will be featuring and utilising all the front-end tech I've been enjoying in the last couple of years:

• React - for me, the most enjoyable way to build dynamic websites; and with the introduction of Hooks, it's just getting better and better
• Next.js - a framework that elegantly combines hand-in-glove with React, doing all the hard work to get code-splitting, server-side rendering and routing to be as easy as it can be
• now.sh - from the makers of Next, this is like the next evolution of Heroku - push code and it's deployed. To a global CDN. Awesome
• TypeScript - 2018's surprise packet was the explosive arrival of TypeScript as a serious way to write, build and ship JavaScript code. As a types fan and Babel-phobe from way back, this is a win for me in a couple of ways
• Styled-Components with Styled-System - Although I could argue that CSS-in-JS isn't really needed on a one-man project, the power of Styled-Components combined with the control of Styled-System is just too nice to ignore

The output of all this tech will be a responsive PWA that you can "install" to your device and use completely offline. No network connection, no data, no native Android/iOS code. This is the future!