Recently I have been trying to study new technologies after changing to a new job and was quite tired. I tried to study “properly” by taking notes while reading books or watching course videos. It was not quite fun and not really the approach I used when I was a kid exploring the world of computer programming.
I decided to throw away my to do list, kanban board, etc and just jump into building something that I would actually use. I remember fondly of experimenting and using programming knowledge to build something either “cool” or useful, and it was very effective in learning new programming languages and frameworks.
I remember it was really boring attending lectures at University, and studying was not very effective. I guess the human brain needs rewards and feeling little successes to carry on doing or studying anything.
It’s the same story with learning to play an instrument, it’s very boring to follow some music sheet that the instructor gives you, but if you try to play some music that you actually like, it’s much easier to motivate yourself to continue practicing and learning.
I decided to rewrite the Meal planner application, this time as a full ASP.NET Core application using Razor pages. I took notes and studied ASP.NET Core before but the knowledge went away after long time.
The simple application will be improved incrementally and eventually be deployed inside a Kubernetes “cluster” hosted in a small personal server. Making this small application will allow me to
- Have some practice in using Razor pages.
- Revisit using Entity Framework Core with Code first migration, using MySQL database engine.
- Containerize the application in a few containers using Docker and docker-compose, with volume mounts.
- Repackage and deploy the application to a Kubernetes cluster, perhaps first by creating K8s manifests, and then by writing Helm charts.
- Maybe eventually setup some CI/CD.
And the bonus is that I will use this project to plan my weekly cooking and grocery shopping, which is useful.
After this is done, I may improve on this project by converting it to ASP.NET Core web project with React.js. To revisit my React programming knowledge. However, to be more focused, I may not invest too much into frontend programming anymore.