This is a common question that I feel a lot of people face every day, from season vets to newbies looking to learn something that might be useful elsewhere.
One thing I can say, from what I've learned, is that the framework isn't really all that important, it's the fundamentals that matter. When I was younger and and the commercial internet was still in its infancy, the big saying was “RTFM,” read the fucking manual. Which is still true to this day. If it doesn't have good documentation, move on.
As far as a language, I'm sticking to JavaScript. I like it. I was never hardcore into programming like all of the Rust and Go people out there. I just want to be able to do stuff. If I ever hit a point where JavaScript isn't doing what I need it to do, then I'll move on.
Not too long ago, one of the members of the Pixel Pints shared with us a simple webapp that he found for building top-whatever lists, called Topsters.
I decided to play around with it a bit, and, as I mentioned in the last post—which was itself a top 20 list—I wanted to have an overlay for links on top of the image, so it was more like a widget instead of just an image. The power of Topsters is not the image that it generates necessarily, but how easily you can generate the image by querying a bunch of APIs based on your media selection (books, albums, movies, or games). So, in that regard adding a little flare to the image seemed appropriate, and why not give it some interactivity? Topsters itself utilizes a canvas element to arrange the pictures of the book, album, movie, or game covers. I could always consider maybe doing that myself, or
As the quality of televised and digital entertainment has degraded over the years, and not wanting to be bombarded by the sheer negativity of it all, I've found myself spending more time listening to music and reading comics. It's been a gradual transition for me... That isn't to say that I don't spend entirely way too much time watching garbage on YouTube or mindlessly surfing, looking at things I'll never buy, or researching video games, or learning things that have no real practical purpose in my life other than to be interesting topics for cocktail parties that I'll never attend, etc.
Something happened though... A tipping point? I did attempt doing a web comic maybe a year or so ago, but I never stuck with it. I have revisited the idea though, and this time I sat and thought about the story ahead of putting pencil to paper, I drew a few outlines and sketches first.
Just from my 9-to-5 and thinking about the type of comic that I wanted to read, I came upon the idea of an insurance company in the relatively near future. But it's going to evolve beyond that, because, fuck it, I have a story universe where people live on Europa and Titan, and giant monsters are a real thing. So I'm going to play with the surreal and the supernatural, the pragmatic and the practical, and I want to put it together to highlight the absurdity of life and the human condition.
