Once I've finished with Hack Reactor, I'd like to tackle on a few additional side projects to get some more experience with various technologies. I've made a quick list so I don't forget:
- Learn statically typed altJs: I'd like to get more experience working with statically typed altJs variants like TypeScript. I recently watched a Youtube video of Facebook announcing their new type checker called Flow which they will be releasing open source sometime later this year. I'm very interested because as I've done coding in JS I've noticed so many times where having a strong type functionality would have caught an error much quicker in the development process.
- Learn TypeScript and Flow basics
- Create plug-in for Atom to enable better TypeScript support (and written in Typescript)
- Google App Add-on: Create a Google App add-on for Google Sheets that identifies commonly made mistakes such as summing the wrong rows, or entering in numbers as a string rather than a numerical value.
- Note: This would be a good use of TypeScript as type checking will be an essential part of the functionality.
- HIPAA-compliant docker containers: I still need to do more research on this but during my brief experience of trying to make a healthcare tech product, I realized that creating a mobile or web application that complies with HIPAA is very difficult and costly. I'd like to create a standard configuration for managing Docker containers so that they would be compliant with HIPAA. I need to do more research and understand the granular details of what it takes to meet HIPAA compliance but my rough understanding is that Docker containers can play a relatively critical part in maintaining HIPAA compliance with online applications.
- Depending on how low-level the solution is, this might be a good excuse to learn Go, since that's the language that Docker is written in
- Open Doc - I started working on a side project that used a very large public dataset from the US government on the number of procedures a doctor did and the average cost of these procedures by specific procedure number (e.g. knee surgery). I'm currently using a MEAN-stack, except the M has been switched from MongoDB to MySQL after realizing halfway that I wanted to conduct somewhat complex queries that had a relational component. The two main outstanding components:
- Fix the search functionality to extend it to the entire database
- Deploy the web app and database to Azure
- Learn other languages - So far, my sole programming language has been Javascript. I'd like to learn some on these list below:
- Go: a relatively new systems language that seems to be gaining traction and offers strong performance
- Python / Ruby: more traditional choices for web back-end
- Java / C / C++ : traditional languages, mostly learning to understand general CS concepts