As in Monty Python, I’m not dead yet…

While work and life has been super busy with everything going on in the world, I have been still trying to find time to learn more and figure out what I fully want to do. Lately work has been a mixture of C#, Python, and JavaScript. I’ve been enjoying them a lot lately. I am also thinking of doing some PHP/Laravel/Wordpress and learning those. Many people would say that PHP and such is “dying” but I don’t believe it one bit. It won’t be going away anytime soon. I’ve thought about using WordPress as a headless CMS to then create a new blog/semi company website. End goal, create a consulting/software company.

The main projects that I have ideas for include the following:

1. Task/Project management software – This software will take all the problems I’ve had with other software and try and make it into an easier management utility for myself and in turn hopefully usable for others.
2. Ticket Management software – As someone that has dealt with multiple ticketing systems before, I really want to create something that will be able to be easy to use and yes I know that there are plenty of options out there, but I feel extra competition and other new ideas are always good.
3. Remote Computer Diagnostics – This is an interesting one that from working at two different employers that deal with different computer systems and running different software, I’d like to create something for businesses, including small businesses to use. This would allow people to remotely connect and get their systems looked at for issues and be able to give a better handling of what a system maybe able to get as an upgrade to work better. May not make sense to some but to me I get what I want to do with network booting and running scripts to get information about a system.

Well hopefully I get time soon to start working on these projects and can at least start the beginning of them so that I can figure out a way of selling these as services.

Free Code Camp

I’m spending all my time right now on Free Code Camp and going through the whole thing. I have not done any of the projects yet but I will do those in a bit of time once I get the lessons done. Currently I’m into the react and redux section of the learning.

If you have not tried FCC, it is a wonderful free and open source learning platform. They have a heavy focus on JavaScript to start and in the end you can do Python for some Machine Learning and misc other processes. They have a great forum for questions and the ability to ask other areas with easy linking to the problems to work with someone on.

I have told myself, no working on personal projects until I am done with FCC. In other news work has been very busy with a lot of C# and JavaScript working on a customer facing portal for our internal systems. Has been a good experience to learn some Kendo UI and JavaScript along with some older MVC ASP.Net.

And finally taking time

So this week I finally took some time and made a small little Angular task application front end. This is just a basic CRUD style application with Angular to see how it was and I enjoyed it so far, needs way more styling and such but it nice and basic for now.

Along with that I did a basic Golang, gin rest API. Wired up the initial displaying of the tasks and next will be adding in the updating, deleting, and creating of new tasks. The API is super simple but that’s what I want. Along with that will be adding in a basic JWT login process. Another thing I will be working on is making a basic static blog for myself as a personal page that is slightly different from this and will be almost more tutorial process.

So far these two I have really enjoyed but know I will want to try many others to get a better handle on what I want to do, including other front ends like vue and react, and maybe svelte.

Beginning to study more

While I have had little to no time lately with everything going on in the world, and having to work a lot lately, I haven’t had as much time to do things as I’d like. I have started to begin learning some Angular and already liking it. In the end I’m thinking this might be my choice for many things in the end. While I’m just doing the tutorial it is minimal but it seems to compile and run fairly fast. And the fact that Angular doesn’t seem to be going away anytime soon is a plus. Another huge benefit is that it is Typescript.

I want to replace the front end at work with this for the project I’m working on at work, but for now it is going to stay as the ASP.Net application that it is with Kendo UI. I’d love to have it become Tailwind or Material with Angular as the framework. Would be cleaner and easier to work with in the end. Well back at getting what needs to get done for the day done. Until another day.

Updates on learning, life and work

The last couple months have been a very interesting time. Between how the world is, working from home, and being pretty focused on ASP.Net and JavaScript. This has made me really shockingly enjoy using ASP.Net.

The part that has been the hardest to get used to was Kendo UI that was used on the project. I really enjoy doing this project, but in some ways don’t know if I’d want to do it for my own personally project, but will gladly take the knowledge I have learned and use that towards other projects.

I am right now on hold for all development of personal projects until my new laptop comes in, that will take over as my development box and my desktop will turn into a home lab setup. This will be great for development and getting things working. I have a Ryzen 7 4800H laptop coming and cannot wait. Need to figure out what virtualization I will do for my desktop, between proxmox and vmware esxi.

And in other news, while I don’t fully like it, I’m going to learn more JavaScript and NodeJS. Part of that is just because it is everywhere and I want to go into web development and web applications. While Web ASM is getting better, it still feels like it needs a bit of time before it fully ready for primetime and for the business world. I’m also going to start doing some posts about things I learn while doing my learning. I figured that might be a good way to get the information down and to be able to have a place where I can go back and look at items I have learned.

The latest in life

While everything has kind of gone weird with how the world currently is. I’ve been working from home for over a month now and wow, while I like being at home, this is enough I’d love to get into office sometimes. I’ve been doing a lot of ASP.Net, Golang, and Python the most. Django has been interesting and not bad to work with.

I want to start my project but the motivation isn’t as much in there right now with all the happenings in the world. I do know that I’ve thought a lot about the different choices that I can make for the project. I just still don’t know what I’d like to do it in. My other thing is if I want to do Microservices or Monolith. If it is ASP.net, Django, Laravel, or Rails, I will keep it a monolith to start, but allow the ability to update to microservices or easily redo as needed.

I do admit that I think a monolith works best for what I would like to do as it can be something easily self-hosted, or SAAS style. Why is picking a choice for this so hard. I just don’t get what I should do and that’s my issue. Maybe part of the problem is that I don’t “need” the project made, it is just something I’d like to do.

Along with this, the best thing was, I just deployed an application at work with Docker. Was a great feeling and was easily done. Anything I do will be Docker from now on as it makes deployment and development way simpler and easier to deal with.

Docker and development

So lately at work I’ve been working on a Golang Web Rest API along with that, a django front end (yes I know it is odd). To begin to explain, the front end was made this way due to taking an older Django 1.4 project, and trying to reuse as much code as possible to make it into a Django 2.0 application. The original Django application also did straight SQL to the database, no API, no models.

So in the end I created a full Rest API for the database, as it was not created correctly at all and had to do a bit of working around to get it working. So the Django application now uses Requests library to pull from the API. To make this process way easier on myself and to not damage the production database, I began using Docker and Docker-compose.

I then decided I would start to look into way more of using Docker for things, and now have started to understand more about microservices. While I don’t still fully agree with them, I get why they can be nice with things like Docker, this will let me work with whatever language I want. Say make my auth server in Golang so it is something nice and fast to provide proof of the JWT.

So next will be doing some diagram of the layout of what I’d like for the microservices and the monolith. I’m going to focus on it being in my thought a combination of both. Allow the ability to expand, however have the ability to be easy to create a bigger application.

Let’s try this again

I’ve been so busy the last couple months with the holidays and many family things going on. Major medical issues, way over busy with the holidays and work. Hoping that this will get all worked out fairly soon.

I’ve started to get myself a little more organized and got my github repo for the EDEN project to be a little more setup. Right now I’ve kept it private until I’ve actually been able to fully get myself something to start. I wish I could just figure out what will be a great way of doing this, I’ve thought about the major part of the application being open source, and then the actual method of how the SAAS was working would be different.

Recently I’ve had some time doing more than the normal languages that I’ve been doing. I’ve also done some work with Golang lately. My biggest things I’ve enjoyed though are between Python, C#, Typescript/JavaScript and then lastly Golang. I have also thought about PHP a lot lately.

I want to focus on something for the back-end to have Types, allow clean architecture, Allow good testing practices, and easily expand-ability. I’m thinking the SAAS portion will be using something like GoLang to be able to get that set up and spin up docker images for people to use.

Yes this was me in full rambling mode.

Clean up time

So my latest quest has been to stop myself from being as much of a data hoarder. I’ve been cleaning up my home NAS to get rid of some of the duplicates and many of the other misc junk old files that I just don’t need or use. This has become a bigger quest then I would have imagined.

One thing I need to first start doing is getting rid of all the junk libraries, like node_modules. I’ve been finding over a 1GB of JS files from node_modules, that annoys me to no end. I love JavaScript and love Node, but this package heavy world is just annoying. These are being dealt with for a big reason…Backup….

I’m trying to have two different RAIDs, one on my NAS and one on my desktop. The biggest thing that seemed to be annoying were all these JavaScript files for coping over. Hopefully removing all Node_Modules folders helps this process. Over an hour to just delete node_modules is bothersome…oh well… Keep on chipping away at them.

Business Ideas have been coming to my mind a lot more, including names. One thing that recently has come into my mind is Honey Creek. There is a couple reasons for this. The town I grew up in was built around Honey Creek and that was my childhood and has just become an idea of recently. Along with that now I live very close to the Honey Creek. While it isn’t the creek it used to be when the Town was founded, it’s still important. This comes to mind recently because the older I’ve gotten anything dealing with History is just so important to me. Well time to get some rest and quit my little blabbing.

Been doing some thinking….

So I’ve been super busy starting to work on doing some of the shootouts. I have officially done, Rails, and Masonite(very similar to rails). Really what I’ve been doing is taking a making a simple blog in each platform and figuring out which is easiest and likable for what I want to do. This is also helping me learn which type of template engine I like between stuff like jinja, erb, or pug.

The ones that are left are as follows:

1. Laravel with Blade templates
2. ASPNet Core with Razor Pages
3. ExpressJS with Pug – Still debating if Express is the best bet for this
4. GoLang with ??? – This could be an interesting thought, but I know Golang is more microservices, which in the end I’d like this to be more of a start of a monolith.
5. Java and Spring

Beyond this I don’t know of other ones I’d like to try. Deep down the Laravel/PHP solution is catching my eye recently. Part of that is due to how everyone in the small business market has PHP applications as it is, including wordpress. A lot of what I want to focus on is things for small businesses. A project where a small business may need any of the following:

1. Task management – such as, order materials for project
2. Customer management – Keep track of customers that you have had
3. Ticket Management – This is more geared to help with repair shops, not always something places would need, but could be helpful.
4. Project Management – This is tied into with the task management and ticket management as you will be able to make projects from task and collectively

Some of these posts are just my rambling, like this one. But it so that some of my thoughts have a place to go.