My original plan was to use Vapor to build the website but the possibility of an upcoming project that required a more mature solution made me change my mind. It now makes more sense to learn a more tried and true web framework. Hence the title “Learning Meteor”.

Meteor is definitely not the first solution I considered. When I think “tried and true”, something in the vein of Ruby on Rails or Django comes to mind. But the proliferation of JavaScript Frameworks made those impossible to be ignored.

and I’ve been ignoring JavaScript for way too long. Lack of type safety made me feel queasy about it and using the same language in both the backend and the front-end, didn’t feel that impactful. Today it seems that time (and a lot of open-source contributions) has proven me wrong. I have to add that TypeScript makes it feel a lot more viable as well. It is time to give up on this or that about JavaScript and get some first hand experience.

After deciding on JavaScript, my first inclination was to use MEAN (or MERN). When it comes to JavaScript, you can’t get more tried and true than that. After some research however a much more opinionated solution like Meteor promised a more rigid workflow and an immediate set of best practices. A beginner like me could use those so for now I’ll go with Meteor.

I also decided to forgo designing the site beforehand. I’ll just focus on the functionality of the site and make the design on the go. The designing something for myself made my “perfectionist” tendencies to slow me down, so for now the plan is to put something out and edit the presentation of it later.