Intro
Why did I create this blog and start writing articles? There are a few reasons;
To keep up with the latest technology stack and tooling. Working behind a corporate proxy with sensitive data limits my day to day ability to do this. I’ll go into more details on the technology behind this blog.
To give me somewhere to save all those tips, tricks, work around, but fixes and the sort that I have amassed and sometimes need to refer back to years later, having no idea what it was or where I found it.
To hopefully give something back to other developers like me who seem to end up trawling this internet for many hours trying to find a solution to a problem.
Keeping up with Technology
So, for the first item, keeping up with technology. I feel like I’ve fallen behind a bit with the rise of cloud and the latest front end frameworks. Especially in my current role which is very much managerial as opposed to hands on every day. I want to be able to help my team and make recommendations on the technology stack. I should add that historically I have always worked with the Microsoft Stack. Specifically ASP.NET, C# and SQL Server have been my mainstay for the last 10 years or so.
My main focus right now is on DevOps, I’m a big proponent of CI and CD. I have used TFS and Octopus DEploy for a few years now and love these tools. However, the capabilities of VSTS excite me and I’m using this blog to better understand what they can do, particularly Release Management.
To write this blog, I used Azure ComosDB, ASP.NET Core 2.0 and VSTS. That’s it so far anyway, I’m using Razor pages and Bootstrap. It uses Markdig for markdown parsing. I’m trying to improve my TDD skills as well. A future iteration or branch will be using Angular, so I can properly get my head around that. I’ll go more in depth into the technology stack in a future post.
Saving my hard work
I quite often find myself searching for the same solution again (sometimes within days or weeks of finding it the first time!). I think to myself, why didn’t I put this in the wiki or save it somewhere. Well, now I have somewhere to put it that other people can refer to too.
Of course, I could just have used an online wiki or even the new wiki in VSTS for this, but I like to make life difficult for myself.
Helping others
I’m always amazed by how helpful the developer community are, how much they are willing to share and help others. It’s about time I gave something back!
Since I first started writing code back in about 2001, there has always been something to refer to. Google Groups, Stack Overflow and various others that have faded from memory. Asking a question and getting an answer
Finally
I really enjoyed writing iteration one of the code for this wiki. I only hope I can tear myself away from writing code and actually write some useful articles. It’s new to me, so it will be interesting to see if my motivation to actually write the articles is as high as my motivation to write code…
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