I intend to discuss many different aspects of software, equipment, solutions and methodologies. you may find some of it useful and other parts not so much. Either way, I am looking to have some fun and I hope you can join in and experience some fun as well.
“Marching along we’re Adventurers, singing a song of Adventurers. Up or down, north, south east or west an Adventurer’s life is best.. an Adventurer’s Life is Best!”
As software developers or other IT specialist, we are all Adventurers.
So, a little about me. In school, I learned my first programming language: Fortran. Other classes exposed me to Basic, IBM Assembly, Pascal and APL. Professionally, I started C programming in 1985 or so on a Masscomp MC-500. It was my first introduction to C as well as the Unix operating system. Later, I was able to use C on PCs, then on a Silicon Graphics Iris 3130. It was a great time for learning! Eventually, I went through C++, PHP, Python, and finally Java. Currently, I do mostly Java and JavaScript (Angular/TypeScript).
My first IDE was Microsoft Visual Studio version 1 (or something like that. It was a newly release product at that time). For Java I’ve used a few like Borland’s JBuilder, NetBeans and Eclipse. I discovered IntelliJ kind of by accident. I was using the Android plugin for Eclipse and somebody showed me Android Studio. My currentIDE of choice is now IntelliJ. I use it for Java (duh), Angular, Python and as a data viewer (I need to get a copy of DataGrip, it’s really nice, but the datasource explorer in IntelliJ works well enough).
Once I got my feet wet with C++ and Java, I started to learn about things call ‘Design Patterns’ and ‘Object Oriented Design’. I used the Gang of Four book and the Booch Book to help drive a design for a client-server application. No frameworks involved.
At the time, waterfall was the SDLC of the day. But some of us started using something called ‘iterative development’ where we would divide the work down into smaller chunks and design, code and test as we made our way through a project. Later, we starting using more Agile methods like Scrum or Kanban. I have been performing with various XP organizations since 2013 and find it superior to producing high quality software in the shortest amount of time.
These days I code mostly in Java/Springboot or Typescript/Angular CLI. But I still find some time here and there to do Elastic Stack or learn some other new technology.