It’s been a while since my last post (18/01/2014) … This year I made a new year’s resolution to blog more (like I did in the good old days).

My first post since the silent years will be a bit of reflecting on why I actually haven’t blogged much and what I did instead. There are off course a lot of reasons why but in essence it boils down to a very simple reason. You set yourself priorities and whenever you don’t have much time, the things that don’t have a high priority you abandon … so blogging was for me not as important as my family, my work, … (you get the picture).

But there is actually another ‘good’ reason: Information overload. I’m constantly reading, viewing presentations, doing small Proof Of Concepts, … and doing these things has taken over producing content myself … I hope I can do things better in 2017 … let’s see 🙂

So What did I do in those last couple of years on a technical side:

Webpack + React + Redux

People who know me, are aware that I’m sometimes complaining about the javascript eco-system. On a regular basis I need to decide which technologies we are going to use to build a system that needs to be maintained for many years. During the last 4 years I’ve done assessments of which frontend framework to use. At times it really felt like the well known blogpost.

I’m pretty glad the Javascript eco system is stabilising (or so it seems). I decided to take a deep dive into Webpack, React, Rexud, …

simple conclusion: I’m glad I took the time to learn all these technologies a bit more in depth.

Vert.x

I’ve done several small NodeJS projects, for bigger applications I’m still more a fan of the Java / JVM world as it still feels more mature for me. However the concept of Node is simple and elegant, so if you have a similar solution in your preferred eco-system, you need to do some investigations … right?

simple conclusion: I’m glad I took the time to learn all these technologies a bit more in depth.

Amazon Web Services

Using one of the online platforms I took a pretty long track on a lot of the features of the AWS platform. I’ve been a frequent user of their services, but they are constantly inventing new things and there were still some blind spots for myself. That’s now much better with guided training and experiments.

simple conclusion: I’m glad I took the time to learn all these technologies a bit more in depth.

Scala course

On Coursera I followed a course on Scala. I followed already some talks and presentations, but never programmed it myself. During this session I was obliged to write Scala code myself. The least I can say is that it was … interesting 🙂

simple conclusion: I’m glad I took it, but will have to look for a more hands-on track as this was a bit to much focused on the theory instead of building real world applications.

NoSQL Tracks

I’ve done courses on MongoDB and Elastic Search. Both very nice products with their own positive and negative points. I’m using these technologies in several of our production systems and things are stable. Like all technologies there is some adapting and learning how they work in a production environment, but they fill the gap needed filling. So I’m glad we took this road.

simple conclusion: I’m glad I took the time to learn all these technologies a bit more in depth.

Mobile Development

My company builds server side applications, frontend applications and also mobile applications. In the previous company I founded, I wasn’t “officially” allowed to build mobile apps, so I had to beef up on this … which I did. In the meantime, I’ve build applications using Xamarin, Native Android, Native iOS (objective C, Swift is on the Todo) and Ionic (React Native is on the todo).

Very simple conclusion: doing what you love without technological impediments is how every developers life should be …

…

I’ll keep some more for my next post, but I’ll also do some more real technical articles.

See you soon (or so I hope)