2017 was an intense year of learning for me. A change of charter for the labs group I work in late last year meant we focused deeper on core technology which was exciting as a technologist. This year that list included Unity, WebVR, Blender, React, React Native, Ruby on Rails and Blockchains (specifically Ethereum). Phew!
Oh! And I got recognized by Philadelphia Business Journal as one of the city’s 10 Technical Disruptors to watch
A big part of this year for me was centered around building Virtual Reality experiences. The first half of the year was focused around building these experiences in Unity which is a very different environment to work in compared to as XCode or Android Studio (which I was deep into last year) but more reminiscent of my previous work in Flash. I really do enjoy Unity and this year made me truly appreciate the game development process. My friend and colleague Jack Zankowski (who did most of the design for our earlier VR work) gave a talk on our early VR experiences at a WiCT event early this year.
However later in the year, we started doing a lot more work in WebVR which, though flaky at times, with platform-specific eccentricities, still was a much faster way to prototype VR experiences. Using AFrame, ThreeJS and WebGLÂ was a fantastic learning experience and hopefully I can do more web animation and 3d graphics work, with or without VR, next year.
I gave a talk on building WebVR experiences at PhillyGDG that you can find below.
One thing I didn’t see coming was how much time I’d end up spending with Blender this year. I had never worked with 3d modeling tools before but our VR project needed 3D models and since I have some experience with illustration and design (I used to work as a freelance illustrator), that task fell on me. In the last 4 months of working with Blender I have gone from god-awful to okay-ish.
Another project I was very involved with was an internal knowledge portal for our team that we built with ReactJS and Express. Having never done React till before this year, that was educational as well, and I completely fell in love with it (even given its weird licenses though hopefully thats starting to change).
The project also made me look deeper into React Native as a platform for mobile experiences. Late last year I had started an app (more on that later) that needed a CMS and a native mobile client and gave a talk on that at Modev DC and at React Philly
I built the CMS in Rails, being most familiar with that, though that wasn’t saying much as of last year. This year, I definitely feel I have leveled up my Rails game a bit. Perfect timing as most Rails devs I know are moving to Elixir/Phoenix or Node/Express 😅
A lot of time this year was also spent giving talks on Blockchains to various internal and external groups. Turns out I needn’t have bothered since Crypto-mania swept the US this year and now EVERYONE is talking about Blockchains. But I did get to work on one project on it, so that was cool
That about covers the tech news in 2017, and there are already a few interesting projects in the hopper for 2018. Stay tuned 🙂
Code Zen 