He says optimistically...

The weeks are flying by for me here in Canada. It must be the cold weather and wishing summer was here, or that spring refuses to stick around for longer than a few hours. I've almost been here six months now so I thought it would be a good idea to start documenting what I've been up to on the tech side, for me to look back on later for personal development or something like that. So here is a breakdown of what I have been up to over the last few months. I just hope it's enough to pass my Canadian probation...

I've joined the Points team!

I'm really happy to say I've joined Points as a web developer on the promotion optimisation team! I will be working with the team to help build out their interactive promotion offering, expanding the teams capacity for web magic. Points also have the special distinction of also being my first Canadian job!

Points is a leading loyalty point exchange platform based in their fantastic office in downtown Toronto. We have a range of services for loyalty point collectors around the world, working with some really exciting partners with some fun and interesting projects to boot. This is a shift away from agency background which I was hoping for and also a much larger company than any I have worked with before, so lots of opportunities for me to learn and grow as a developer. I'm very excited for what the future holds for me here.

Ultimate Angular Course

After playing with Angular for a number of years, but never really knowing what was happening behind the scenes or what the hell an @NgModule() was I decided it was time to invest in some knowledge. I signed up to Todd Motto's Ultimate Angular course.

I opted for the Angular Ultimate Bundle, which includes the full Angular course, with an extra course on TypeScript and NgRX on the side. Also getting into things like RxJS for an understanding of its awesome features like observables and how useful they are in any number of situations.

Since taking this course my understanding and confidence in using Angular has grown exponentially and I would recommend this courses to anyone with an interest in learning Angular. I opted for the Ultimate Package with everything bundled which is great value for the quality of content. Have a look here: https://ultimatecourses.com/angular

Flagpole - WP feature flags plugin

I've been working on my WordPress feature flags plugin. Since becoming full-time employed again, development has been a little slow, but I am still very much invested in getting this off the ground. Lots of learning about WordPress plugin development and object orientated programming in PHP, especially exploring more PHP constructs and features than my usual WordPress theme experiences.

In terms of next steps, I'm planning on focusing on Unit/Acceptance testing next. A full CI/CD testing suite to ensure I don't break anything while working on it is the goal. It currently has a partial setup on CircleCI but nothing near what I feel it needs to carry on building features. Once I get that up and running it is then on to getting it published to the WordPress plugin directory.

You can check out the project on GitHub. Let me know what you think, and if you have any ideas or feature requests feel free to submit an issue.

Made my personal website a progressive web app

I’ve been spending some time getting to know progressive web apps (PWAs) and ServiceWorkers and have turned this site into a fully offline friendly, and an installable PWA. This is one of the first ones I've got working. Very interesting technology, with lots of future with things like Capacitor blurring the lines between Native, and Web apps!

Experiments GitHub Repo

One final note is that I have had a bit of a cleanup around my GitHub repositories, moving a lot of my random sandboxes and tests into one new repo. I've moved to a mono-repo for al my little experiments and sandboxes. An idea I've shamelessly stolen from https://github.com/adriancarriger/experiments