Don’t be deceived, php positions are still hot, used for enterprise solutions more then ever before and niched just enough to pay top dollar. The language is a staple in web development.

Fact: we all rely way too much on other volatile systems for the sake of rapid development.

If aws, google cloud or azure ended tomorrow, our damn planes would fall out of the sky. I say that jokingly but for real, even the industry leaders refuse to scale out their own.

If SAP was to self destruct tomorrow, all these parent companies would implode and take their children companies with them.

I thinks the questions not even how but when.

We use docker and minikube to avoid hefty setups and flexibility. Now it just takes two weeks to setup the minikube env

Ive been reading on kubernetes for damn near a year now and it still isn’t clicking. I need a position doing this shit

They lied to you. .Net doesn't back the corporate world and it certainly doesn't back the companies you want to be a part of. The cutting edge companies you want to be a part of our pushing technology that's had it right from the start, not some rehashed framework that's clawing back to appear open source and with the times. Btw, I still don't consider it open source if it works out of the box better with their targeted cloud services. Same goes for meteor and their fancy deployment alternative. Hardly a tutorial out there that doesn't involve deploying the way they want you too.

It's time for me to get outside my comfort zone and explore some up and coming languages/frameworks. The last couple years have been alot of php, node.js and .net.

Im looking at learning more about python/django or go. Im eyeballing elixir at the same time but im not totally sure what direction its gonna go or if api development will be its ongoing use case.

As far as choices going forward as a web developer (not yet reaching out into the abyss of other interests), what is the best option for the market to dive into ?

Block chain sounded like a fun concept to dig into a do some tutorials around with python or something. Maybe build our own simple blockchain thats still thorough enough to do the complexity of blockchain justice.

HA! yeah 3 nights later of jumping down the many rabbit holes of blockchain, im realizing I dont have the time or energy to touch the tip of that iceburg. I think I gave up after trying to figure out how to elaborate on the merkle root. "We could have like a visual tree of of the transactions and how they combine hashes to form the merkle and show its combined hash. Ok yeah this will take forever".

Walking away from it, I have a new appreciation for the subject and those who are revolutionizing it. Definitely will be the future of our currency.

Everyone needs to take a page from CircleCis books of UX. Its sooo clean, soft and well thought out. The config editor is magic and makes jenkins blueocean look like some sad attempt to stay relevant. Everything about this UI makes me not ever want to stop using it. Bravo

Once you implement CLEAN arch, im finding its hard to go back. And i know i was bitching about the scaffolding a week or so back but after stepping away and trying to write the same server using a controller/service/repo approach, im finding myself abstracting more and more as im bothered by even the smallest amount of coupling between layers.

Clean archs dope and well thought out. Anyone with an itch for agnostic layering should jump on this.

Burp Suite is niiiice.

One good thing about working on horrible, horrible products is that you’ve been there now. You’ve seen the worst and clawed through it. Nothing will come as much of a surprise to you. You’ll see shit codebases and it’ll be surprising but not soul shattering. I feel like that’s a required piece of experience in itself is being put through legacy hell. How else do you k own how to right future wrongs?

“You can’t use a different language/framework for every service!”

Fuck off, I can do as I want. Some layers need a trick typed, business logic focused control. Some just need rapidly prototyped and changed on whim.

I love that sense of freedom

I’m so fuckin general I got asked in an interview what normalization was. I couldn’t think of the words to say. I practice normalization by common sense in any database I’ve designed but can’t break it down for you by its “n”s.

And yet when they ask me how a JWT token works, I give a detailed description of each step in its description.

No I can’t explain why symfonies ORM out beats laravel a eloquent. I tinker with laravel on one project, .net on another, django on another. I don’t care how each one does it, I’ll figure it out when I need it.

And yet when they ask me how to in real time notify a subset of active users on a page, I can describe the general need for a web socket and pub sub service to publish to a specific hash of subscribed clients.

The specifics don’t consume me. I’m not a symfony dev or a django dev. I’m a senior dev that has a wide spanning general tone for what is needed. I dive deep when I need to dive deep and I’m handicapped with not assigning to memory words traded for common sense like “normalization”.

Anyone that’s worked contract over got questions:

Do you have to take time off without pay?

What’s the chances of going full time? Is it just a recruiter sailing point or likely?

Job huntings been kinda fun actually. All these recruiters all over the united states stroking my ego telling me im perfect for this and that.

But then I sat back today and looked at all the recruiters im working with, something like 20 of them, all the companies. How many interviews do I have? 1. 1 interview. They get you in the door and then just drop off the map.

Laravel's sail is ridiculously nice.
Coming from this framework to absolutely.anything else will be dreadful.

It's like theyre mission is to make other developers happy and not stroke their dicks to how over the top complex they can make everything.

Had my first interview with apple 🔥

After 8 years of development, I gave python a try today. It honestly had me hooked at its usage of lambdas and list comprehension but im finding alot of things I like about it.

Honestly it offers the same things I like about javascript: rapid prototyping and multi paradigm.

But then i get up and running with django. Ya its nice and its not a template first solution like alot of opinionated frameworks out there.

This just feels very wholesome to learn. I feel comfortable and in a good place.

I love system/dev ops but I suck at it.

I feel like the whole area of work is basically following other peoples ways of doing it that have worked. Am I correct in that assumption or is that just a product of my own lack of experience ?

I’ve been learning Jenkins the last week as my introduction into ci/cd.

I even ran it’s docker image on my own instance.

And let me tell you it’s been great. I now know exactly why the hell not to ever use this piece of Java littered piece of shit. And not blue ocean In no way saves it from its expiration.

Moving on to circleci or buddy now.

Im digging silicone valley (the show)

Yeah its dumbed down just enough that my wife can follow along to some degree. That kinda sucks cause I still await a fully dev targeted show.

Regardless, great show. Inspiring to some degree.

Trying to re-arrange my web api to fit this "Clean Architecture" form of rather unprescribed structure.

Its the kind of architecture where if you were to ask a guru "ok so where do services live in this layout", you would get in response "Let me ask, does this service mingle with your infrastructure level devices, does it fulfill key functionality on your domain models? If so, place in some directory within infrastructure that will be arbitrarily named and its interface in some interface directory in core".

No absolute right or wrong answers, never black and white, always 5 other questions to answer your one because everything is so damn contextual.

For anyone working with Clean arch let me ask this. With micro services splitting the boundary line shorter and shorter between functionality, is the robust nature of clean arch even needed anymore ?

It makes sense for splitting large repos into logical pieces that can be plugged in and replaced easily but thats also one of the major take aways with micro-serviced architecture.

Here comes your millennial diagnosis of a hype word filled architecture and how its affecting me:

I was diagnosed with a mentally and socially crippling degree of OCD at a young age. As I got older and away from areas that contain hundreds of people on daily basis, my tendencies resided but still manifest themselves in lesser ways. Over the last 8 years of development, I've taught myself to steer these compulsive tendencies into the art of software architecture and code quality.

Over the last 3 years Ive become more obsessed with the concept of designing agnostic, pluggable pieces that are weighed down by very few dependencies. I had not read any books on pluggable architecture or dove deep into what SOLID means to me. It just "naturally" felt like an evolutionary step in where my software quality needed to go. I had never approached microservice architecture and at the time knew little of it so instead I went as far as breaking php or node components up into their own packages on npm/packagist. Making packages of them was as far as I could go to assure my components were entirely plug and play. It helped my mind understand them as separate entities and devs after me know that they in no way could depend on my core suite of services.

Then I ran into this "Clean architecture" book and my initial reaction through out it was "hmm, this is a much better way of achieving what I've organically been coming to". Inverted dependency was new to me. I had heard it a thousand times but never put it to practice. I approached agnostic behavior by much harder means of separating binaries into their own address spaces or combining them from different binaries to run in synchrony. The idea of pushing hard decisions off and separating concerns through interfaces was an eye opener but my it still does not solve the issue of monster repos.

I don't understand how teams allow services to grow exponentially with little check and Idk want to know. It doesnt take a principle dev with 20 years experience to say "this shits starting to get out of hand, lets split it". The minute you are forced to use your IDE's global search to work efficiently within the code base, it's too late. As silly as separating a project by npm packages sounds, it still was just a logical means of breaking up something far too complex so that it doesnt get in its own way.

Then came micro-services or my final realization of it. Ive found a perfect placement that satisfies my own compulsion for cleanliness between the principles of clean arch (or onion, or port arch) and service oriented arch. Teams work well within small codebases. They work well with low dependencies. They work well in a suite of services that can be plucked and rewritten without cascading dependencies to consider. Teams work well when given hard http specs to abide by when talking with other services or with a gateway.

Now someone tell me where in the flipping fuck I can work where these architectures are taken advantage of. Ive been through 3 companies in three years and each has been a shit show of monolithic web apps, mono api's. Shit our last suite thats now sunsetted was 600k lines of vanilla php, no framework, no orm, different approaches to architecture that did not unify, high dependencies, one repo.

The biggest thing coming out of that for me was knowing what I despise in architecture. Having these horror stories to pass on forever when discussing our bright futures. Im rambling now but I suppose that becomes the closure needed for this ted talk. Going through hell and coming out with a lesson learned. Feeding my mental disadvantages in life with best practices in my career.

Why does every major version. of dotnet core have a different way of setting up Identity. And why is there so many different contextual meanings of the word Identity. Why in the hell do their docs have to state "Microsoft Identity, not be confused with dotnet core identity". Why cant they just call it JWT issuing and claims building or some shit. I cant keep up with whatever "Identity" Intels with every release. I swear my v3 API auth looks nothing like this v5. Granted teh v5 approach is cleaner and a little more abstracted but damn still.

If you spent a week fixing that bug last month that has now been sent back to you ...

And you still have to go through your PR to remember what part of the codebase handled that piece of functionality ...

Your architectures probably wack and doesn't define your use cases well.

Like if problem "x" is strictly tied to functionality "y", I should be able to say it is located in Controller<y>, repository<y>, model<y>, service <y>.

I've been reading alot about "Screaming architecture" lately and it makes me yearn for more. Imagine a suite of software, so transparent that new hires can begin making resourceful impacts within weeks.

That'll be the day!

Show some love & run this in your browser console from the your feed page

let plusbuttons = document.getElementsByClassName('plusone');
Array.prototype.forEach.call(plusbuttons, button => {
button.click();
});

You know its too bad the feeds not lazy loaded or I could just keep expanding the likes

Always tell junior devs the same.

You'r not going to become the senior dev or architect you have in your grand vision by sitting around this company fulfilling mundane tickets.

Start thinking through new ideas, possibilities, software that you think could really help a specific niche Or pick a model that already exists. The ideas prior existence doesn't matter but having a new idea that has potential has always inspired me to keep pursuing it.

Break out lucid charts, learn how to map out your domain objects and their relationships. Build out a service map of how you want things to work together. You dont have to know how context boundaries or demilitarized zones work or any that technical jargon. At the end of the day those concepts <should> develop organically and then the jargon will come to you like "oh thats the term for this". Some people learn better from knowing and then implementing. I usually come to it organically then learn about it later. Thats the point of this though. Read up on it, understand enough to map it out and then start building them out.

Use a language you want to be proficient in but are not. Use a framework you want to understand but do not. If theres an auth protocol in high demand that meets your needs but you do not understand, run with it. You'r proficient with mysql; mongo would also be a good fit for the business needs but you've never used it. Perfect, use mongo then.

Find avenues of improvement down the line. Maybe the simple records resource server would be a good candidate for GraphQL. Pull in a pub/sub to increase service communication/aggregation, learn websockets to maintain a vital client interface. If you dont know what the fuck im talking about, perfect! Jump in there. Start small, build up, tinker.

You'll meet soul sucking blockers all along the way and thats the biggest thing that separates seniors from juniors is having worked through these issues before, time and time again. Embrace failure, embrace change, maintain initiative because you can be another miserable dev that keeps the cogs turning making a decent 50k salary or you can be a positive catalysis.

Devs be like “unemployment where?” Lol we good. Corona who ?

As soon as my kids get out of the car for school, I crank some third eye blind, go home, fuck my wife, have some coffee and start spilling code like a madman.

Why does every popular language & framework have to have a whimsical character to represent it?

Its like they know were just a bunch of children playing around