Dev Stack Update for 2019 — Lateral Vectors

I've always tried to keep my programming skills current, and my development toolchain updated - even through law school. Just in case this legal practice thing crashes and burns. Almost ten years into my career and things still have a sense of being tentative.

Lately it feels like the whole enterprise is losing coherence as the rule of law is distorted by force. When logic is trumped by power, I find myself retreating into code. The last time something happened, I was a law student and the strained readings like La Bugal B’laan were flying from the Supreme Court’s docket. I coped by mapping codal provisions into a entity-process diagram. I also learned Git and Ruby (mostly for Rails).

JavaScript would be my primary development language, because it is pretty much everywhere in the development stack these days, so the rest of my toolset will be JavaScript-centric:

Node.js - for application logic at the server side of things.
jQuery - for document object manipulation.
Electron - for cross platform desktop application development (pretty much the same thing as browser-side development, thanks to this framework).
React - for doing clever UI stuff.

I’m still going to be using other languages, since I might start teaching machine learning next year. I’ve been weaning myself off Ruby and transitioning to Python for sometime now - the latter has a lot of machine learning libraries that can be useful for my research. Although instruction would likely use R or Octave.

My go-to editor (from Emacs and then Sublime) is Microsoft Visual Studio Code For a while, I was fiddling with Atom - but when Microsoft bought GitHub, I figured which way the merge will go (Code is based on Atom technology anyway). Thanks to an educational discount, I have an Azure Devops account I can use for requirements, testing, and bug tracking. I also use the LaTeX extension so I can draft well-formatted academic papers in the same environment where I code.