What a crazy year this has been! A year ago my girlfriend and I had just started construction of our new house, so we were living temporarily in a ruin from 1892 and I was working at d60 in Vanløse. Now we are all settled in our house, Elisabeth is now my wife, she is starting her phd, and I have been working as an independent consultant for 11 months!
So it has been a very busy year for os, and I do hope 2015 will be a little less action packed, with time to enjoy our new lives and do some travelling. A trip to Barcelona is already in the cards, so it is looking promising.
Becomming independent
Starting as an independent consultant was something I had been considering for a while. When we moved I chose to go for the job at d60, because it was a good chance to build a new team. Long story short, that didn't go as I had hoped, so when opportunities presented themselves that would make starting on my own fairly smooth I had to seize the moment, and I am really glad I did. I have really enjoyed the freedom, the chance to work on very different projects and the improved possibilities to speak at conferences.
During these 11 months a have amongst other things built a workschedule module and a budgetting module, I redesigned a big webapplication, wrote an fairly large API, worked on components for QlikView, wrote a tool for calculating distance matrices for a logistics company and started work as a consultant on a large ecommerce project. So it has been really exciting and a lot of fun. When it comes to speaking I have been at the Warm Crocodile Conference, DDC, NDC, CNUG, Visma, Ida, Keyboard Warriors and Campusdays where I have been talking about Firebase, Angular, Azure and Single Page Application patterns. I tend to agree that the one thing that is more fun than programming is speaking about programming, so I have enjoyed all my talks and I hope to have time for pleanty of more talks next year.
Out with the new in with the old
Lately I have been looking at the problems that ensue from using the modern SPA frameworks, and thought about if we actually need them. I would say that more often than not, there are better ways of going about building these rich web applications, and your time is better spent learning patterns and good practices. To support this I recently started a Github project that I have called TSPatterns. The idea is to show sample implementations of some of the key patterns that you can use to build a well structured modern web application. I chose to do the project in TypeScript, because I think it is a good approach to a "better" javascript, and because everything you see there will be possible to do with EcmaScript 6 as well.
The idea is not to push TypeScript as such, but to show there are simple and clean ways of building an architecture, without taking dependencies on frameworks that will be depricated and leave you stranded. So knowing your patterns and a few simple libraries is likely to make you and your customers happier.
Azure taking hold
Azure has become an increasingly important of my work this year, with new storage services like Redis Cache, DocumentDB, and Search looking interesting and VM's, websites and Blob storage as the backbone. It was also the cause of much pain a few weeks ago, when one of my customers were down for two days, because of the Azure outage. Hopefully this was a one time thing, and Microsoft learned from their mistakes, so we can keep looking forward in 2015.
Another year another language
I still try to dive into a new language each year, and this year it has been Elixir - which I think I will also spend some time with in 2015. It has some really interesting ideas, building on Erlang and functional concepts, but with a Rubyesque syntax. It is still a young language, but I do hope it catches on, and that maybe I will get to do real work in Elixir one day.
The numbers
As always it is also a time to look at some numbers. There are fewer numbers this year, but I tend to think it is because I have been more focused, and especially the talks have taken up some of my hobby coding time.
- 8 talks at usergroups, conferences and companies
- 14 blogposts counting this one
- 1921 total downloads of MiniMe by now, even after bundeling and minification has been part of ASP.NET for a while
- And a bunch of geek nights, geek beers, user group meetings, online training and podcasts
Throughout the year I have had a hard time finding good new technical books that interested me, so most of my reading has been articles and blogposts, but I did get to read these three.
- NodeJS the right way
- Building Cloud apps with Microsoft Azure - best practices
- How to stop sucking and be awesome in stead
I already ordered my first book for 2015, so I can hope it is a sign of more interesting books comming, with “F# deep dives” looking interesting.
Bring on 2015
Now I will lean back, and enjoy some days off, because 2015 looks set to start off with a bang. For anyone working in .NET I think 2015 will be especially interesting, with the comming versions of C# and ASP.NET looking to become game changers.
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