Unconventional

My first real successes with server programming were back in 1998 when I started tinkering with PHP.  Back then, ASP was at version 2.0 and was - similar to PHP - a way to mix markup and scripting.  Both tended to yield some fairly interesting results and I'd say for the most part, both were quite comparable. As such, even back then I had a choice.  I could focus my tinkering on the Microsoft based tools, or I could try my hand at this thing called open source I'd been hearing about. I had everything I needed to succeed in both spaces. I could either download everything for free or I had complete access to a set of MSDN discs in a binder with a cover like this: If I wanted to build ASP scripts that spoke to Access or SQL databases, it wouldn't have been a problem.  In some ways, I even tried, installing all the tools and trying out the environments. Each time however, I abandoned the effort because I felt like I couldn't tinker my way into it. So, Instead I...

I'm not by definition a front end developer, although because I do back end development, things like program structure and build systems are interesting to me regardless of whether they target servers or browsers.  So while I can't make something look pretty, I still enjoy managing the complexity of JavaScript/ES transpiled apps. This is a seemingly trivial post in an area that I feel doesn't get enough attention sometimes. We recently purchased and started using a premade template for some minor projects at work.  It actually looks quite nice, has a responsive layout and isn't too terrible .  My usual complaints of "too much markup" and "lots of busy spaghetti scripting" still hold true, but most of this seems to be quite fire-and-forget. I ended up not being involved with the first few integrations of the template and while overall it ended up working, any trained eye could see where some of the cut lines were missed. I had resolved...

Had this tweet show up in my feed this morning and I think it's worth an explicit mention.   Eric Evans  talks a bit about Domain Driven Design, a topic he's also not coincidentally published a book on many years ago: Watch @ericevans0 ' talk from #DDDEU 2016: "Tackling Complexity in the Heart of Software" https://t.co/qu7YRJ943G pic.twitter.com/QxW0HB2xJs — DDD Europe 2017 (@ddd_eu) April 11, 2016 Something I've been encountering in my travels as a developer and leader of developers is the varying levels of motivation, confidence and enthusiasm my peers conduct themselves with.  At one point during his talk, Eric speaks about how a hypothetical carpenter spends more time talking about his output than he does how he might use any particular tool. Eric also - in my opinion - correctly highlights that the best people in the industry tend to be master technologists.  They constantly have their head in the space and are naturally disposed to aspects of t...

In an effort to get a better understanding of the ASP.NET framework, I've started a simple toy project from scratch.  I've really been enjoying how easy it is to plug everything together with Microsoft's reboot of the framework.  Just spin up a project.json file and get going, it's pretty impressive how much you can get done with so few files. I think the community has been doing a great job with blog posts, so I've not had many opportunities to contribute any unique content that isn't already covered. While working through things today however, I thought it might be nice to try and prove out how Entity Framework 7 can work with non-Microsoft databases and containers.  The most appealing at the time of writing being postgres thanks to the awesome work by the people over at npgsql . Because I've been developing in Windows using Visual Studio, the first thing that would be nice is to not have to spoil my system with a database installation.  No surprise, d...

@shanselman Not digging the bandwagon MS hatred for #PHP . #cantwealljustgetalong — Alexander Trauzzi (@Omega_) March 5, 2015 I tweeted the title of this blog post tonight and it got me to thinking about some of the encounters I have as a more or less polyglot developer who finds good and rewarding employment in PHP. I just finished attending the excellent and stimulating Praire Dev Con 2015 this week.  I'll let the web site speak for itself, but in summary it's a regional conference that attracts speakers from far and wide.  For two days, men and women enjoy a brief glimpse of professional-speaking disneyland , returning home late in the evening and passing out from social and intellectual exhaustion. One thing that many of my coworkers past and present have noted about this conference though is that it is very .NET centric.  Now to me this is of course no discouragement at all.  These are exciting (or possibly intimidating) times for many a Microsoft dev...

I started a new project late in 2014 which I knew would be fertile ground to keep pace with the what's happening in Laravel 5.  It's been a great learning experience merging in changes from the upstream Laravel project branch as they happened. The keen observer might have noticed however that Taylor made a commit on December 4th that "broke" support for packages designed to target Laravel 4. @Omega_ ehhh maybe… i’ll see how it shakes out… need to finish that up next week — Taylor Otwell (@taylorotwell) January 1, 2015 Patience is key, so I was happy to continue waiting for the next great thing . In Laravel 4, packages allow their configurations to be overridden per environment.  A package can ship a default configuration which can then be copied into the project as a template to be combined with the original's settings at runtime.  Think of it as a really tricked out  array_merge_recursive . By removing ServiceProvider::package , what's being co...

A friend of mine who I occasionally help with development tasks came to me the other day asking about starting a project which would involve leveraging an API. Given that I develop APIs and domain architecture, this seemed like a pretty good fit for my talents.  I can produce the business logic and a simple chrome extension that talks to it and then we can explore further opportunities later, knowing that everything has been nicely abstracted. I've coded against a few public APIs in my time for various things ranging from social media to push messaging.  Although each time, I'm always left feeling like what I did was never a first-class citizen in my project.  In many cases with APIs, you're only leveraging the external model, but in the case of my new project, I actually plan on "extending" it... Read on if you're interested in any of the techniques involved, including repositories and project structure. Extension Defined When working with an extern...