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Check out the State of JavaScript Report for 2018

The yearly “State of JavaScript” report has come out. It’s a survey of over twenty thousand developers and this year’s survey is beautiful in terms of visualization and succinctness.

The results of this year’s survey show through amazing periodic table type of charts with conclusions through quadrant charts. Conclusion pages are the best way to quickly get through the survey though it’s certainly worthwhile to savor it by going through all of it.

If you have limited time then check out the wonderful summaries:

JavaScript Flavors: https://2018.stateofjs.com/javascript-flavors/conclusion/
Front-end Frameworks: https://2018.stateofjs.com/front-end-frameworks/conclusion/
- Svelte is an interesting one: https://svelte.technology/
- Vue.js is definitely worthwhile if you’re not in React land (though there’s nothing wrong with React)
Data layer: https://2018.stateofjs.com/data-layer/conclusion/
Back-end Frameworks: https://2018.stateofjs.com/back-end-frameworks/conclusion/
Testing: https://2018.stateofjs.com/testing/conclusion/
Mobile and Desktop: https://2018.stateofjs.com/mobile-and-desktop/conclusion/
Other Tools (Python as a language seems to be the winner here): https://2018.stateofjs.com/other-tools/
The Opinion page is both interesting and funny: https://2018.stateofjs.com/opinions/
A neat game-show like reveal on the Awards page: https://2018.stateofjs.com/awards/
The short over-all Conclusion page covers the rate of change in JavaScript GraphQL’s ascendence: https://2018.stateofjs.com/conclusion/

Google’s Flutter SDK and the Holy Grail of Mobile Cross-platform Development

In software development, there is this holy grail of write once, run everywhere. The goal is to write one piece of code that runs in an optimized way (code/compile/UI efficiency) on different hardware. Recent emphasis on Mobile-first design has shifted this pursuit to cross-platform mobile development.

Flutter is an open-source mobile application development SDK created by Google. It is used to develop applications for Android and iOS, as well as being the primary method of creating applications for Google Fuchsia.

The long and short of it is that this is a cross-platform development environment/language. Its biggest competitor is React Native.

I’ve come across an excellent article by Marco Bellinaso covering his learning and use of Flutter: “Flutter: the good, the bad and the ugly”. This article is great in that it pulls no punches and it provides resources to anyone that’s interested in learning and using Flutter.

Thoughts? Feedback? Let me know: @eli4d on Twitter

Tech Pick

I’ve mentioned the source control management system Git before as well as Jason McCreary’s excellent course. I recently came across some great information from Atlassian in regards to Git. Atlassian hosts a Github competitor called Bitbucket. One of Bitbucket’s great advantage is free hosting for unlimited private repositories.

Now onto the awesome tutorials from Atlassian:

Media Pick

It’s that time of the year, the leaves are turning gold and falling in some places, and Costco has Christmas decorations for sale. It’s also the time of the year for non-profit pledge drives like Radiotopia – a purveyor of independent, thoughtful, and occasionally heart wrenching podcasts. I am a big fan of “99% invisible”, “The truth”, and “Trump Con Law”.

Consider that only 7 in 10,000 listeners are actual supporters of Radiotopia (and I would guess similar podcasts).

If you’re a fan or a would be fan of Radiotopia check out Radiotopia’s Fall 2017 campaign.

Alternatively, if you’ve ever used Wikipedia, then please consider donating to this fantastic resource.

Fun Pick

The iPhone X’s animoji capability is like Snapchat’s face filters on steroids. Here are some best animoji karaoke videos that I’ve come across (I know it’s ridiculous, but this cracks me up when I imagine the faces of the people that are producing this – contorting their faces and lip syncing to create the animoji facial expressions):