Until a few weeks ago my frontend programming experience ended with jQuery so I decided to do something about it and start getting up to speed with modern frontend development. This ranged from starting to mess around with React, to using ES6, to integrating webpack and Babel in these projects. I’ve been using Sublime Text for the past 6 years but am switching to Visual Code Studio as my primary editor.

So far I have two projects in different stages of completion. The first is a turning my “JavaScript Tools” page into a standalone app using React and Electron. The idea here is that I have a set of tools that live online but I have a soft spot for desktop apps and want one of my own that I can just keep open and quickly switch to whenever I need to get anything done. Over time I see this evolving with tools that I end up using on a frequent basis as well as shortcuts to make them fit for a “power user.”

The other project was inspired by the Sleeping Giants twitter account which calls out major brands for advertiser on hate-based sites. It’s still a work in progress but the intent is to automate the capture of the ad on the site and the identification of the advertiser’s twitter account. The next step is to broadcast this information back on Twitter - either automatically or surfacing the content so people can do it themselves.

If you’re interested in helping out or just want to follow along both projects are on GitHub: https://github.com/dangoldin/dan-tools and https://github.com/dangoldin/ad-detection.