I give you the Gift of Knowledge!

  • Chris Wallace
  • Tue Dec 24 2019

It's better to give than to receive, so this year I'm giving the gift of knowledge and know-how...lots of it.

Happy Holidays! I'm sure everyone is winding down to a few festive days off between now and the new year before things start ramping up again in January. I myself take some extra time off to finish off some tech debt tasks or side projects I've been meaning to finished so I can start fresh in the new year.

This year one of my side-projects has been something to not only help my learning and development going forward, but also provide useful resources to my fellow engineers. To that end, I present my shiny new 'resources' page, my gift to everyone that needs some recommended reading or something new to learn within the realms of software engineering.

resource page

Over the past 6 years I have accumulated hundreds (maybe even thousands) of bookmarked articles, tutorials, code snippets and solutions to help me in my learning. Up until now I've adopted a crude system to house all these learning resources, but now the solution is no longer fit for purpose and needs something more proprietary which I can own and extend over time.

resource client

Therefore, my Holiday Project this year has been a bespoke solution for myself to suit my knowledgebase aggregation, grouping and searching requirements (like a pinterest clone but aimed solely at software engineering). Furthermore, I wanted to have a system in place to be deep-link resources from my site so others can benefit from them. The result has been some new server-side projects, a new graphql endpoint, a new client-side back end, and a new part of my gatsby build pipeline.

resource list

If you visit the resources page currently, you'll see it's starting to grow, there's also a client-side search tool to help filter out specific resources. As the amount of resources explodes over time I'll iterate on the current solution to ensure it performs at scale, and adopt a more mature search engine.

Going forward I'll be adding links to new resources on a regular basis, curating what I've aggregated so far and publishing them under specific sections and groups. There's hundreds of articles to go through so this will be a big undertaking, but rest-assured there will always be something new to check out.

Thanks and I hope you have a Happy Festive period and a fantastic 2020 ahead of you!

Chris :)