About Me
I’ve been working around the web my whole life, but when i’m not at my computer, I love nature, travel, and my family - and ideally combining all three.
About this blog
Primarily a learning aid for myself, a chance to practice writing, an excuse to revisit experiences, technologies, and concepts I’ve not used in a while, it’s an opportunity to consolidate, formalize and expand my knowledge in various areas.
I write about topics that interest me without agenda, from technologies or solutions that really made an impression on me, to things I think colleagues would benefit from reading, mostly related to web development and cloud computing.
Similar to a tree falling with no one to hear it, this blog, even without audience, will make an impact on at least one person - the author.
But as you are reading this, I hope you find it useful, and that it makes a positive impression on you too.
My Background
The web was in its infancy when I first dabbled in HTML and CSS – and I wasn’t much older myself!
Back then, Geocities hosted my personal site, dedicated to the simpsons, a majestic juxtaposition of scrolling text marquees, gifs, midi files and under-construction signs. It was a far cry from today’s slick, lightning-fast, interactive interfaces. Yet, despite the mind-blowing differences between the web of now and then, a lot of the core principles and technologies remain the same.
There’s only so much one can do with static HTML and CSS. So, I quickly moved on to PHP, MySQL and JavaScript, building and maintaining dynamic sites for local businesses.
But the sites got bigger, the scale got larger, and PHP and MySql alone were no longer enough. In 2012 I was introduced to Chef, AWS and Solr, and for me it was a paradigm shift and the beginning of my love for the cloud.
The ability to scale and automate the servers themselves using code, treating them as cattle rather than pets, coupled with the idea of using services like Solr, Redis, Event buses etc revealed a new world for me, of services integrated into systems, providing so much more than one could ever hope to program.
Soon the concept of serverless arrived on the scene. AWS began rolling out services that eliminated the need for provisioning or underlying EC2 instances. This, coupled with containerization, enabled me to experiment like never before.
At the same time, the frontend was being revolutionized too; Angular, React, and Vue dethroning jQuery and allowing us to offload a significant amount of logic to the client, creating truly interactive, single page, browser applications with a streamlined backend consuming managed services.
The web has exploded in complexity since the early days, the breadth of knowledge now needed to be truly full-stack is mind boggling.
We need to be familiar with, and able to work on all aspects of the stack, from debugging browser issues, and css, through the server, the database, the cloud services, the tooling we need for building, understand the underlying protocols, and be able to architect and plan solutions, anticipating the pain points, interpreting the business needs, and translating them into technical requirements.
And it continues to evolve, with technologies like webComponents and webAssembly and, of course, the next paradigm shift, AI.
The pace of change is relentless, and the tools and services we use are constantly evolving.
I feel I’ve been very lucky to have been able to evolve with them.
