Lately, I’ve had the amazing opportunity to take a few weeks off from work. This has given me some time to work on some personal projects, but more importantly enjoy my day to day - without having to watch all the “AI News”. To be fair I’ve been watching things at work to keep up but the distance has allowed me to breathe and reflect on the current environment of software development.
After a couple of months of heavily using both Co-Pilot and Claude for development use I have a few thoughts. I know…I know another person jumping on the hype train talking about AI, but hear me out. There’s such a hype train around AI and how it’s going to take our jobs I think it’s worth putting out a more responsible view point to cut through this crap. It’s a great tool and I have no doubt that it is here to stay, but I’m not jumping on the bandwagon that this is the best thing since sliced bread. For a few reasons
About a year ago I had to step back into my family business due to a death. During that time I was operating the business while trying to figure out a new owner I was looking at trying to stream line a process that had a pain for many years. It was a fairly simple problem to solve and I had used multiple CRMs geared towards our industry, but none of them had this one feature. So what did I do? I decided prototype an application to see solve my frustration. As a business owner…terrible idea, but as a programmer..typical! Normally, I would reach for my normal dotnet stack, but I wanted to try out the new Rails 8. This has been the inspiration for the recent Rails posts, and now I want to share the project.
I’ve been writing dotnet code for the last five years, before that I was a front end developer. I’ve always built different things with Rails apps, but it’s been years. Lately, I decided to build a production app that’s being used by my martial arts school. My goal was to see what has changed, and thought it would be cool to look at the process now that I have multiple professional years. Before I just followed the convention of how to setup an MVC without truly understanding how the stack works. Now I have a much better understanding
As Dotnet developers it’s very common to use ORMs like Entity Framework to work with databases. While it’s not the most performance tool, it’s extremely useful and flexible to use. With that it’s important to remember that the methods we use can change the performance of the query. Whether to use a Where followed by a FirstOrDefault or should we just use the FirstOrDefault? And what kind of query statement will either of these make?
It’s optional name parameters…thank you for coming to my Ted Talk
While there are many features I would like to be added in Typescript there is one major one that needs to make it’s way over from C#. That would be optional named parameters. At this point I’m not sure how this hasn’t been added into the language. Personally, I used it a lot when writing in C# and I’ve ran into a few self inflicted bugs that named parameters would have prevented. For those who don’t program in a language that has named parameters it allow you to specify the parameter when calling a function or method.
After coding for a while and making more mistakes then anyone wants to admit we as programmers tend to create a spidey-sense of potential issues when doing code reviews. This is one of the primary reason we as an industry do code reviews. It’s commonly called “code smell” - when we see a pattern or code usage that seems off. A few months ago I ran into one of these and wanted to highlight the usage, because I see even experienced software engineers fall into this common practice. I would like to highlight that while good practice in theory is commonly agreed upon, people get lost in the details. That’s ok as long
One important aspect of managing data coming in through our api(s). Of course this is what data types and validation is for, but an easily overlooked aspect is handling strings and how we want store them in the database. It’s an easy oversight for anyone who hasn’t handle a large amount of data that is being used by multiple teams. An easy example is when two systems are comparing an email, but one system didn’t trim any white space and the user inputed their email with a space at the end. Sounds simple, right? It happens much more often then you’d think. We don’t want to add a lot of extra logic every time we compare strings to ensure there isn’t any white space unless absolutely necessary. Which is why it’s important to add logic to handle this on every request - which is pretty easy with Dotnet.
It’s been a couple years since I started this blog and there hasn’t been much progress. There is a couple different factors but the main one has been focus. I’ve been working Ritter Insurance Marketing since 2017. I started there a junior front end developer and in 2020 I moved over as a back end developer. Working primarily on back end services written in Dotnet. I started this blog a couple of years ago to try write down my thoughts and some experiences, but obviously didn’t keep up on that.
I use to write a lot of rails applications when I was newer as a developer. Fast forward almost a decade later with professional experience, I thought I would look into rails again. I’ve slightly followed the progression of rails over the years and agree with some points of DDH’s. Main about JavaScript and how it’s become overly complex for web apps. Although, I personally love static type languages. I know shocker - coming from a dotnet developer.