I just learned how to create to-do lists in markdown. Here is a basic example.

  • write
  • edit
  • publish
  • read

Cool stuff. I just learned this from a website called draftin.com, a free online writing platform that uses markdown for writing and git for version control. I’ll need to test it out a bit more before I use it as my go-to writing platform. There is still nothing quite like MS Word for serious writing - at least as far as I can tell there isn’t.

I have continued to work on coding quite a bit. I finally have a sense as to what Gulp can do, and I have been using git on the command line a bit more. Let me break it all down like I often do when writing this blog.

  • Git: I finally figured out how to create a repository on GitHub by pushing a git repo from my own machine. Previously I could only create a repo on GitHub and then clone it to my machine, but I can now do it in the other direction. This is much more useful for me. I have also been thinking - though I haven’t done it yet - about how I should be using branches to work on projects, only merging them with the projects when I am satisfied it won’t fuck things up. Basically, I’ve just been using git as a backup system for my work, when really I could be doing a lot more.
  • JavaScript: I have been working on JavaScript as per usual. The most recent thing is that I have been working with a book titled Learning JavaScript: JavaScript Essentials for Modern Application Development. This book emphasizes ES6 notation, and it includes a number of examples in Node. One of the first chapters, as well, dealt with creating a full development environment with the use of Gulp and Babel as well as a linter. I don’t really need the linter since I already have one in my text editor (Atom), but it’s cool to know how to do it.
  • Babel: You know, I’m not sure I really need Babel anymore. Essentially, Babel is used to transcompile ES6 JavaScript into an earlier version on the idea that most browsers don’t support ES6. The Learning JavaScript book emphasizes this, but it was published in 2016 - I think most browsers have caught up with ES6. At least Chrome can easily read ES6 code. I’ll continue to use it for the practice, but I’m not convinced it is necessary anymore.
  • NodeJs: What I like about Node is that it uses JavaScript to do server-side coding. This makes it less pressing to learn another language such as Ruby or Python in order to do full-stack development. I’ll follow along with this for now and put Ruby on the back burner.
  • Gulp: Wow. Gulp automates tasks in the development process, making it possible to perform multiple functions by simply entering the word “gulp” into the terminal. Fucking great.