Tag: javascript

My Node.js Story

Once upon a time in a part of the tech universe far far away, there was a general consensus to block all JavaScript from browser execution. It was the way things were because JavaScript was seen as harmful. You see, the early miscreants of that time had used JavaScript to write all sorts of problematic code that would attack, steal, or otherwise undermine the data one sent across and received on the internet. This is the time I could have started learning JavaScript, but because of its horrid reputation I stayed far away and wrote C, C++, C#, Java, and event some RPG, COBOL, Pascal, and some other code. It was glorious, and the languages were beautiful in their own ways, while JavaScript was shunned by almost everybody in that tech universe! **

Today, things aren’t all that much different, but we make it easier for the whole horde of miscreant scripters to write problematic code in JavaScript. The difference is we allow it everywhere and just try to catch it and prevent execution. Thus, different, but the same, it’s a crazy world we live in.

I started picking up a little JavaScript at the tail end of 2007, when the “JavaScript: The Definitive Guide” was the top book to delve deeply into using JavaScript. It wasn’t another year until the seminal “JavaScript: The Good Parts” cut down the size of what one really needed to delve into by removing the cruft and focusing on the good parts. Slowly, JavaScript was finally starting to take shape as something useful.

Writing JavaScript at this time was a mutant challenge of having it look like Java while being organized like a trash pile of scripts that had no way to manage dependencies or otherwise. I mean, NPM was years away from existing, and really the concept of libraries in JavaScript seemed to be a foreign concept at the time.

2008 rolled around, “JavaScript: The Good Parts” came out, the changes started rippling through the industry and as traction started to mount. The penultimate event occurred the following year in 2009, which at the time almost nobody noticed. Dahl started Node.js at Joyent to enable server side JavaScript code use. At the time, many were flummoxed by the notion, weren’t confident in the single threaded event loop, and overall its release and the project continuing were in jeopardy from this point.

But the project continued and persisted!

Continue reading “My Node.js Story” →

Oh Gerd, It’s Friggin’ 2018 Already, I survived and here’s a retrospective!

Overall 2017 was a successful year, but the ride was an emotionally and physically brutal train wreck, figuratively and literally. Here it is the first and I’m recovering and hoping that 2018 is better. But before diving into 2018 I’ve got to recollect just a few things for 2017.

Peloton become Pelotech. For most of my work in 2017 I knocked out a few key projects for Pelotech. First was the build out, expansion, and management of their branding and online presence. Follow @Pelotechnology on Twitter, or for a few business links and topics they now have a LinkedIn Pelotech Page.

While also I got to step in and build some awesome CI/CD systems, software solutions, and modernized a number of projects for a variety of companies including Nordstrom, Impinj, and others. We used some pretty excellent tools too including Rancher, Drone.io, Kubernetes, and a host of others in addition to our regular stacks for Node.js, Go, and even .NET in some places. Joachim even knocked out an impressive .NET core app with React and other components; pt 1 & pt 2.

Beyond that I’ve started multiple courses that will be released this year, some with LinkedIn Learning (prev Lynda .com). The courses range from Terraform, to Kubernetes and Go, and related technologies. These have been a lot of fun to learn about, prepare, and setup for an audience ready to learn and use these technologies. I’ve always enjoyed teaching people that are curious and I’m sure I’ll do a lot of that in 2018 too.

.NET Fringe took place again this last year too. Again, it was an awesome lot of fun. Again, a great geek train crew. Again a lot of fun to lead the fringe bike ride. .NET Fringe has turned into more than I think Troy, Glenn, myself, or others ever really thought it could have. Hopefully we can keep it going, albeit 2018 is a bit cloudy so far, at least for me when it comes to organizing events.

I wrote a short retrospective on .NET Fringe and what makes a great conference, if you’re organizing and looking for that feel, this may be a helpful read.

Beyond just the professional I’ve become a mortgage and US homeowner statistic! Yay! I think. It was an inordinate amount of work in my opinion and the verdicts out on the actual benefits over time. But as for a place to live, having a home to return to every day, a home that will eventually be owned is a rather pleasant feeling.

Here toward the end of the year, December 18th was kind of a summary however amidst all the other things. I’ve wrapped up my work with Pelotech, survived a train wreck, and am looking forward to getting into some new projects this year (more on this real soon).

Other than these things, 2017 was a year I’d promised myself I’d lay low, maybe even drop the ball if necessary, and kind of just relax. I wasn’t real successful at that and I’ll just have to consider 2017 a failed extended vacation. For now, Phil Haack & Hadi Hariri summarized my sentiment perfectly.

Anyway, that’s my retrospective for 2017, now time to put together some of those resolutions for 2018!

Home Depot Wrap Up and Job Talk

First, I will be available with a possible start date of November the 28th. I’m currently wrapping up some big projects and completing training for the Home Depot Team and the great progress we’ve made over the last year. If your company is looking for someone with my mixed array of technical skills and soft skills, you can check out my resume & details and initiate job talk with me here!

On to the rest of the news. If you’ve seen me speak lately I’ve mentioned the open source efforts we’ve had going on at Home Depot and related efforts I was working on. Some I’m working dilligently to release via the Home Depot OSS Organization on Github and I’ll still be releasing others soon via my Github account (@Adron) and blogging about it here on Composite Code.

Since this is one of those rare times in my career where I’m not 100% sold on what I’ll do next, I’m open to fielding prospects and seeing what is out there. This is a different approach for me, as I usually determine a company, particular work that needs done and go after that gap. But I’d like to get a feel for what companies feel they need at this particular time. Since I have a wide range of skills, I can step into a number of positions and immediately start to contribute to projects within a company.

Here are some positions I’d find attractive and could provide value for (or build) a team immediately!

Building or Expanding a Team

Need someone to hire, build, and create a cohesive, diverse, and powerful culture of core contributors (developers, designers, advocates, evangelists, or similar). I can knock this one out of the park for the right company. Yes, I’m a bit particular, but I’m not just going to whimsically work for any company (the best people won’t work for just any old company anyway). If you are looking to put a team together and want somebody that can do that for you, I’d like to sit down to a conversation soon. Let’s talk jobs.

Coding Architect

Have some architecture problems, that seem a bit unique or problematic? If you need someone to come in and push forward on design, patterns, practices, and actual implementation then this would also be a conversation I’d be interested in having. I’d be happy to dive into whatever the stack might be (or help decide on the stack): Java (Scala/Kotlin), Golang, Node.js or even .NET (C#/F#) for the right company. Let’s talk jobs.

Development & Operations Architect

Have some architecture that needs to go along with an application and want to build or insure a solid continuous integration and delivery pipeline (or messaging based queue for delivery to production)? This is another possibility I’d be happy to talk about. I really love working with systems to build out reliable immutable infrastructure, data storage mechanisms (distributed, RDBMS, whatever the need calls for) and insure development can continue forward with extremely high confidence levels. Let’s talk jobs.

Developer Advocate/OSS Project Lead

If you have an open source project I’d love to take lead on it and also provide advocacy for that project. This role is not to be confused with evangelist, as that’s a fine role for other people, but I want to be in the code and advocating from a position with the team. I’ve done this before with projects like the Iron Foundry for Cloud Foundry and others, and loved it. Let’s talk jobs.

Mergers & Acquisition Technical Evaluations

This is not something one sees everyday, but I’ve worked in a consulting role and have assisted others with this work before. I find it really interesting looking at prospective ROI, current run rates, but also at the specific details of whehter a product or service can even be incorporated and integrated into the acquiring company. In the case of merging, this differs from acquisition in that both entities and both companies’ products and services will both need to polymorph into a new whole. If you’re company is looking to get into some M & A’s, let’s talk about how I can help.

If any of these sound like a need you have, please reach out with additional information and I will be in contact ASAP.

Besides the above theoretical jobs above, here are a few other things that I would like in a job. Things that just make it all worthwhile, here’s a list.

Work Environ / Soft Skills / Culture

  • Flexible hours remote or remote (out of office). Whatever the case, I’d like to work with a company that has the ability and acumen to manage the workflow and efforts among team members remotely. If you’re a company that wants to upgrade the development and operational characteristics of the culture, I can also help your company incorporate highly effective remote capabilities.
Cascadia
  • If there is travel, I prefer to keep it to a productively effective 10-15% of the time. Traveling dramatically decreases overall ability to contribute to actual work in an effective way. I do love to travel, speak, and get involved with the worldwide community but I always like to make sure that this involvement doesn’t stymie me from contributing to actual coding, design, and related efforts. NOTE: If travel is within the Cascadian Bioregion (see image: includes YVR, PDX, SEA, etc) it’s easy to increase my travel to 15-25% of the time as travel within the region is so easy. I probably should include SFO too, it’s super easy to get there and doesn’t cause disruption to daily workflow. (i.e. < 2 hr trip)
  • Design, build, and communicate. These are the things I like to do. I like to create what will work for high volume or high speed systems, then build prototypes and communicate how these work. Maybe I would be the one deploying to production, maybe the system is production that I’m deploying, but whatever the case is I’m happy to lead efforts on architecture and work with teams to build that architecture.
  • I love to provide leadership for teams, I love to build teams, and I like working with teams. Albeit I’m particular about team diversity and culture, I can bring my own skills and the ability to bring people together on a team and expand teams. If the culture is off kilter, I can help with that. If the culture is spot on, I can work effectively with that. Whatever the case, I’m a high communication, GSD type of guy provided the right environment and reigns removed.
Google Cloud Platform

Technical Skills

  • I’ve found Google Cloud Platform (GCP) a pleasure to work with lately. That combined with Terraform, Packer, and related HashiCorp tooling has been a lot of fun and provided an extremely high value for us at Home Depot.
HashiCorp
  • AWS has been another I’ve worked with that has been of stellar value, not particularly at Home Depot but at multitudes of startups and during consulting. AWS is still for many things my go to cloud provider option.
  • Azure is another I’ve used that would be an interesting service to use again. It’s been well over 2 years since I worked with or provided Azure support or consulting. I’ve got a soft spot in my heart for this cloud provider since I led teams back in 2010 writing some of the first white papers for the service!
  • I’m comfortable with C#, JavaScript, Java (mostly), and am looking forward to writing more Golang and happily will dive into Scala, Erlang, F#, and a whole host of other languages.
  • I’m happy to work with container tech (Rocket/CoreOS) or Docker and I’ll also help keep your company grounded that it might not be the panacea you’re looking for. But they definitely have lots of awesome uses!
  • I’d prefer a Unix/Linux environment to work in, but I’ll happily help remove Windows Servers from deployment requirements! 😉

Contact me or let’s talk jobs, cheers!

__2 “Starting a Basic Loopback API & Continuous Integration”

In this article Keartida is going to dive into setting up a basic Loopback API project and get a build of that project running on a continuous integration service. In this example she’s going to get the project setup with Codeship.

Prerequisites:

  • Be sure, whichever system you are using, to have a C++ compiler installed. For Windows that usually means installing Visual Studio or something, on OS-X install XCode and the Developer Tools. On Ubuntu the GCC compiler and other options exist. For instructions on OS-X and Linux check out installing compiler tools.
  • Ubuntu
  • OS-X
  • For windows, I’d highly suggest setting up a VM of Ubuntu to do any work with Loopback, Node.js, or follow along with this material. It’s possible on Windows, but there are a number of things that are lacking. If you still want to make a go of using Windows, here are some initial setup steps here.

Nice to Haves:

  • git-flow – works on any bash, handles the branching and merging. Very nice scripts to have.
  • bashit – Adding more information to the bash prompt (works on OS-X, not Ubuntu or Windows Bash)

Continue reading “__2 “Starting a Basic Loopback API & Continuous Integration”” →

__1 “Getting Started, Kanban & First Steps for a Sharing App”

This is the first (of course the precursor to this entry was the zero day team introduction article) of an ongoing series I’m going to put together. I’m going to write this series from the context of a team building a product. I’ll have code samples and more as I work along through the material.

The first step included Oi Elffaw having a discussion with the team to setup the first week’s working effort. Oi decided to call it a sprint and the rest of the team decided that was cool too. This was week one after all and there wasn’t going to be much else besides testing, research, and setup that took place.

Prerequisites

Before starting everything I went ahead and created a project repository on github for Oi to use waffle.io with. Waffle.io is an online service that works with github issues to provide a kanban style inferface to the issues. This provides an easier view, especially for leads and management, to get insight into where things are and what’s on the plate for the team for the week. I included the default node.js .gitignore file and an Apache 2.0 license when I created the repository. Github then seeds the project with a .gitignore, README.md and the license files.

After setting up the repository in github I pinged Oi and he set to work after the team’s initial meet to discuss what week one would include. Continue reading “__1 “Getting Started, Kanban & First Steps for a Sharing App”” →