Learning new things

This past week I spent a few days playing around with some new frameworks to augment my knowledge/skills as a developer. Below you’ll find some notes on the things I played around with:

• Node.js – I played around with this a while back when working with customizing bootstrap with less but now I am playing around with this after being intrigued with using JavaScript as the server side language.  I am also using this as an opportunity to learn more about Javascript!
• Less - This is dynamic style sheet language that I am learning mostly to be able to modify the look and feel do Twitter’s Bootstrap UI framework.  It’s pretty interesting and with my recently knowledge of node, I was able to download the less-preview page from github and run it locally on my machine to play around with it!
• Twitter Bootstrap – I also downloaded and started to play around with the new version (3.0) of this library as I going to be using it for a new project I am going to be presenting at work.  The goal is to customize the look and feel to match the standard at the company I work at.  I have used this library in another project at work and it’s been really great to not have to worry about building a custom UI in html!  It allowed me to focus on building new features and not have to worry about building UI components like tabs, tables, etc!

I also briefly looked at some Sharepoint Development sites as my supervisor stated that they may send me to some sharepoint training for a project I may get involved at work. I am going to be continuing to play around with these new technologies and hope to start using my knowledge of them soon on both my projects at work and some personal projects as well!