# A New Beginning
##### June 8th, 2020 By Alex Hu
![main](/images/a-new-beginning.jpg)

After converting a couple of Flex / ActionScript applications to React + Redux at work for the last few years,
it is time to refresh the server side skill set as well. To document the journey, I decided to have some fun
creating my personal portfolio site and have it serves as a test bed for different technologies.

There are quite a few things I would like to learn. The primary ones are

 - TypeScript
 - React with Hooks, without Redux
 - Node.js
 - GraphQL + Apollo

I also want to pick up these ones along the way:

 - MongoDB
 - Authentication
 - Cloud functions
 - Cloud deployment
 - Docker
 - AWS Free Tier / Google Cloud Platform Free Tier


After converting a couple of Flex / ActionScript applications to React + Redux at work for the last few years, it is time to refresh the server side skill set as well. To document the journey, I decided to have some fun creating my personal portfolio site and have it serves as a test bed for different technologies. There are...