New Year, New Tech Stack

new year, new me, new obsession with technologies my university doesn't teach.

the plan

my courses this semester are great and all but i want more. specifically, i want to learn things that seem useful in the real world:

i finally understand what it means when people say "it works on my machine."

docker is basically: what if we shipped the whole machine? not just the code, but the exact environment it runs in?

i containerized my little portfolio project. now it runs anywhere. this feels like magic. dark, yaml-based magic.

FROM node:18
WORKDIR /app
COPY . .
RUN npm install
CMD ["npm", "start"]

four lines. my project runs anywhere. i am powerful.

i signed up for aws. there are so many services. i don't know what most of them do. i'm scared.

current understanding:

i set up an s3 bucket. uploaded a file. felt accomplished. then saw the billing section and panicked. (free tier, thankfully.)

i'm trying to actually learn css instead of just copying stack overflow snippets.

discoveries:

i read three chapters of the rust book. i understand ownership in theory. in practice my code doesn't compile and the borrow checker hates me.

this is fine. this is growth.

university teaches fundamentals. that's valuable. but the industry uses specific tools, and those tools change fast.

so the plan is: learn fundamentals in class, learn tools on my own, become the mythical "full stack developer" that job postings seem to want.

easy, right? right?

docker-compose file is 47 lines. i understand about 30 of them. progress.