Wow! We’re into 2018 already and I haven’t blogged for months and months. That’s such a shame because I’ve been doing so much cool stuff. So it’s time to get back on the horse!

New PWA Pluralsight Course in Flight

I’m presently working on new Pluralsight Course related to Progressive Web Apps and Sensor Integration. I’m still scripting but there’s tons of cool stuff in there.

It’s called Sights and Sounds

Sights and Sounds Logo

But not just any travel app. We’ll be developing a lightweight PWA on your handset and:

  • Taking photos;
  • Recording videos;
  • Lauching Notifications;
  • Interacting with Fullscreen
  • Doing Geo & directions;
  • Launching native apps;
  • Sensing network access and coping with it
  • Doing offline sync magic with Firebase (including image upload)

I am so pumped about it. It’s pretty scratchy at the moment, but it’ll get there:

Sights and Sounds Screenshot

Discovering Polymer

I’ve been doing heaps of Angular over the last year (and loving every second of it) - so my first thoughts were around teaching the PWA course with Angular.

But it’s hard to teach the concepts in Angular without it being super-Angular-specific - lots of @ViewChild action which doesn’t translate well to other frameworks.

So I stared exploring what other, more lightweight, tooling I could use to teach the course.

Then I discovered Polymer 2 and fell in love!

Polymer Blurb

Here’s a super, super lightweight framework - mostly just a browser API with polyfills - hence the #UseThePlatform mantra.

The kicker for me is the cool component action. I love, love, love components. And Polymer has a vast library of high quality components to get you started. So I can just throw on a Google Maps component, or a bunch of Material Design components, wire them all up to some backing properties, and I’m productive.

The learning curve was super gentle too. It’s just JavaScript.

And the big win for teaching is the no-build-chain-just-straight-F9-driven-development. Light and fast with minimal clutter to distract you.

I’m really interested in how people find this approach from a learning perspective. And if you’re a hardcore framework person, the translation to your framework of choice should be very straightforward - or just use the existing Polymer integrations to bolt in WebComponents to your existing Angular/React/Vue app.

Can’t wait to get recording!