Hello! 😊 Welcome to my blog. I began building it to learn ReactJS and GatsbyJS. The most surprising aspects of learning these technologies were the object oriented programming in JavaScript and the batteries included approach of ReactJS and GatsbyJS.

JavaScript is evolving at an unbelievably fast pace - thanks partly to the widespread adoption of NodeJS and its package manager NPM. The latest features of JavaScript, which initially feature in the latest version of ECMAScript, can be transpiled to a browser-acceptable version of JavaScript using BabelJS. Newer browsers are adopting new JavaScript features although at a slower rate than ECMA are standardising those features. An interesting variant of JavaScript is TypeScript, which is developed by Microsoft to bring type safety to JavaScript. The chrome developer tools (Ctrl+Shift+I in Chrome) has an interactive JavaScript shell which I have used extensively when using JavaScript.

Perhaps the most difficult aspect of learning modern JavaScript is knowing where to begin. In my experience, having something to build simplifies the starting point (so I recommend the ReactJS tutorial).

This site (eapen.uk) is built with a static site generator based on ReactJS - known as GatsbyJS. Gatsby generates a fast static site which complies with modern web standards. It was also very fun to learn thanks to the excellent documentation.