About six years ago, this blog served as a voice for my growth into a full-stack engineer. It was a candid picture of what I did on my own, and professionally, on the way to becoming a senior engineer. Two years ago it went silent. Not because the learning came to an end, but because I was fully engrossed in a position I loved. Although I am still happily employed, my love of learning hasn’t stopped. So, I have decided to dust this off, along with a revamped portfolio, to demonstrate what I’ve learned in this time away, and what I plan to do next. Opportunities for growth and learning never end. You just have to be open and motivated to do the work.
I have a laundry list of things I want to demonstrate, most of which I do in my current role. That’s one thing I love about being a full-stack engineer. You get to touch everything from the bare-bones (virtual) server to all of the software and tools installed on top. Not to mention the architecture of the resources across the network, orchestrated to deliver an outstanding, performant, and efficient user experience. And let’s not forget all the processes and tools we use to build a reliable and repeatable pipeline for continuous and seamless delivery. If you like creating and having broad responsibilities, it’s good stuff.
So, what’s next? Portfolio 2.0.0 (gotta follow SemVer).
If the blog is the voice, my revamped portfolio will be the body (chiseled, and all Mat Fraser’d).
This is an on-the-fly brain dump of what I plan to demo, in no particular order, with some overlap, and subject to change depending on which way the wind blows (read: what the next tech flavor of the month is):
- OOP PHP
- AWS cloud services and architecture (mirroring my expected certification)
- Big data
- Microservices
- Serverless
- Vue
- Linux and server administration
- Document based databases
- Cache systems
- Algorithms, along with a nod to performance/efficiency
- Testing (unit, front-end)
- TypeScript
- Node
- Data structures
- Atomic deployment
- CD/CI
- Queues and messaging
- Asynchronous events and multi-threading
- Shell scripting
- sed, awk, vi, and all things CLI
- TDD
- DDD
It’s a shotgun blast of content, but fun, interesting, and relevant to my on-going interest in learning and passion for engineering.
Think Michelin star software-as-a-service, and I’m your Maître d’. Would you like some education to go with your SaaS?