elstar IT

Is the time of the year to have some time to reflect.

 

Entering the IT

Around 2000 I entered the IT world, first as a Domino Administrator, but after a good talk with a former colleague I made the switch to become a Developer.

So I became Domino Developer and learned Formula language and later Lotusscript. Did some certifications.

When the browser became more important I moved more and more to web development and did some great projects, for example I build the public website of a big insurance company. Was a lot of fun and challenges on such a high traffic website.

 

Learning Java

Along with these web development projects there was also an increasing amount of Java projects, so I learned Java and did a few nice Java projects. It was really nice to do these Java backend projects, but Front end development was   screaming for my attention

 

XPages

In 2008 IBM introduced XPages, and implementation of JSF. They took 1.1 version and ripped out all the unnecessary parts and added much needed features, which are still not native in the latest greatest version of JSF, like partial refresh. Which the XPages developer took for granted.

I was an early adapter, and despite of the lack of Documentation I liked it. At that time, It was a perfect combination, Java in de the back end, combined with Front end development, like HTML, JS and CSS.

I have build nice solutions.

 

Going freelance

In 2014 I made the decision to start my own business and became a freelance developer. As a freelancer I followed the money and in the Netherlands there is high demand of Java developer, especially in the enterprise world. So I moved more and more to the JEE world, learned a lot of new tooling, like Maven, Jenkins, JUnit testing and much more…

Most of the applications I build was based on JSF, with a lot of Spring Framework.

Meanwhile there was also time to build more XPages based applications, like the HR Assistant which was our entry of the ICS Development Competition, where we used Cloudant as datastore and IBM Watson to analyse.

I also found some time to learn more of the Salesforce platform, I heard good things about it. I must admit I liked the way Salesforce helping to get new Developers on board, via their Trailhead platform

 

Full stack

The last months I was looking around to new technology, had a short look at ReactJS. Looks good and very lightweight, the developer descide what should be loaded. Created a very small application.

But now AngularJS 2 has been gone gold, I am learning as much as possible. Took our HR Assistant application as an example and I am busy to rebuild it in AngularJS 2. It is a steep learning curve, but I can get the data from Cloudant, so what could go wrong 😉

 

Next step

First of January 2017 I will start as full stack Java developer, at a new customer. It will be a very interesting project with lots of new technology like Java, AngularJS, Docker, Salesforce, Websphere Liberty. They are also looking to the cloud, and Bluemix was mentioned.

So interesting times are ahead and I am looking forward to this new step in my career.