Origins in IT and Back-end

The origins of my coding experience are writing batch files for a non-profit organization to automate basic tech (true-to-life IT support) tasks. Programming at a deeper level wasn’t something I really took seriously or that ‘clicked’ with me until later, when I got into Powershell.

Powershell is a scripting language, I’ll be the first to call it out as something that isn’t meant for building applications. I say this because I’ve tried and been partially successful, though the result is really only usable as a console GUI unless you put the amount of work into building UIs that might as well just be learning C#. However, it served as a nice medium between more syntactically complex languages and the command line, teaching me both as I explored its uses and capabilities.

React

React Logo

Back in 2016-2017 when React hit the news with Facebook’s implementation of it on their service, it stuck in my head as ’the’ proper front-end framework that web devs would use. But since front-end has always been something I shy away from because of the requirements for ‘design’ principles I lack, I never had any interest in touching it. When I later moved on to Javascript to work on the web, the medium which has continued to be the most ubiquitous and accessible for anyone to use because everything has a browser nowadays, I decided to learn a framework that would allow me to build web applications more quickly and efficiently.

With Python and SQL under my belt, and frustration from the tedium of scripting interactive webpages with JS event listeners and DOM manipulation, it was time to find a better solution.

Vue 3

Vue Logo

Two knowledgeable friends I spoke with about this expressed a preference for Vue.js’s performance and usability over React, and it simply confirmed that’s the route I should take in starting this journey. I’ve built the foundations of an app I had planned for a while and while I can’t claim to know all of the ins and outs AND there are limited direct web map integrations for Vue I understand, I’m fairly happy with how straightforward it is to truly break up displayed data into components and make dynamic webpages. I’m not a front-end developer, but I can build web applications that are functional and usable to display my data and interact with it. This is the missing link I needed to make my projects more accessible, user-friendly, and performant.

I wound up fairly lucky entering the space when I did in January of 2023, as Vue 3 (after a year of ‘beta’ style half-release) had just been formally released as the new standard. More importantly, I can use this tool alongside HTML OR in place of it with Single-File Components (SFC). The conditions determining which is favorable are a bit more complex than I can explain here, but my initial testing was with SFCs and there are definitely pros and cons.

Project: A3 Planner

Here is a link to the project I’ve built in its current state: https://indigofox.dev/a3-planner/worlds

It was a very nice intro to Vue and I’m excited to continue building on it and growing my full-stack integration skills now that I have a way to show things in a nice format on the web.