Enterprise era:
I have started software development during my college, started with some standard stuff at the time (JAVA, .NET). It was big at the time, banks and corps were constantly looking for workforce to cover their thirst for development. That was the time everybody were doing stuff like:
- Java enterprise
- EJB (java beans)
- .NET WebForms
- Oracle DB, MSSQLServer, IBM DB2
Like I said, everybody was doing that, I was doing that too. I learned a lot about that world, enterprise software and banking in general. But after a bit, I was a bit bored with it so I started with other things like CMS, Javascript, MVC and some open-source projects that were evolving around HTML, CSS etc.
Start-up era:
Then it came 2008 with economic crisis and 2009 with recession. Suddenly all these enterprise and bank projects were hit hard, I realized it is time to adapt or to burn. Luckily I was already one foot in the door with open-source projects and I just switched to these new cool technologies where everything seemed tangible. ou could develop faster, you could demo it sooner than ever before. At the time I was joining a few startups, we were delivering products faster than ever before with these cool technologies:
- .NET MVC
- NodeJS
- MongoDB
- Single page apps
- jQuery, Angular
- HTML, CSS, SCSS, bootstrap
Cloud era:
After few startups and few years working there I have learn one thing:
To deliver an application it takes 2 basic steps:
- write application code
- deploy and run it
Second step is equaly important as the first one. Operations matter! Apps should be deployed to scale up if necessary or should scale down to preserve budget if necessary.
At the time I was working on Salesforce.com platform. It is cloud native CRM number one in the world, and even though it is cloud-native, some things cannot be fixed by adding more money to it. Tried to improve its scalability by integrating part of the system with other cloud providers, doing in-cloud computations etc. Some things just have to have the different architecture to be cloud-ready.
I have started to work with different clouds and services (Heroku, AWS, IBM), learned a lot about services and automation processes, reusable components and vendor services like:
- AWS lambda
- AWS Cognito
- Kubernetes
- Docker containers
- monitoring
- Prometheus
- Grafana
- Cloudwatch
At this time I already started with full time freelancing, I learned to adapt to new technologies quickly as the client would require to. I guess you can teach an old dog some new trick.
Educational era:
As I said in the previous section, I learned a lot about operations and clouds. Apps should scale!
On the other hand, I have also realized I can’t scale like that, my time is limited. I have to learn new technologies every day, I need to adapt them, but also I need to teach younger devs how to do the same. How to adapt, how to learn from the dev process.
I have to learn from younger devs about new cool technologies and at the same time teach them the best I can:
Still doing that. Still trying.
