Programming Life Updates
posted under category: Life Events on February 9, 2021 by Nathan
I have a handful of small things that I don’t want to write up in long-form, so here are a bunch of them.
COVID stay-at-home orders have been fine
Ups and downs, for sure. Work had previously taken a hard stance against working virtually. They did a hard 180° last March, and none of us have visited the office once since then. I hope somebody ate that Cliff Bar on my desk. I would like to bring my chair home, however. I have an AmazonBasics chair at home, which was fine for the amount of time I needed it, up until last March. Now I’m wishing I spent more money on it.
Through the Spring, we scheduled theme nights at home. Hawaiian night. Video game night. Science night. We probably had a dozen of them. All the kids got to pick at least one, and we’d use whatever decorations we had to make it a party. I highly recommend this activity.
South Carolina has actually been pretty chill about it. We’re happy enough to mask up, even if it’s just for show, but if that’s what keeps my favorite restaurants open, then I’ll wear 2 masks if I have to. We’ve had a bunch of friends with COVID, but very few serious cases, and no deaths in our circles of friends. My airplane company is struggling though. We’ve had lots of layoffs - some of it for the better but most of it just for the sadder.
Homeschooling has actually been successful
My oldest child graduated high school, a year early, and even started college with a scholarship! As a homeschooling parent, this is a huge win for us. We decided to homeschool her when she started reading chapter books going into kindergarten. I guess firstborns are always early. We’ve been keeping it up, and now really identify ourselves as a homeschooling family. It’s a weird thing, but honestly it just keeps working out. Especially in light of the trainwreck that was 2020.
Both of my teenagers got jobs where they make pretty good money and are liked by their peers. Again, a homeschooling win. They’re responsible, and they make me proud. That makes a dad’s heart warm!
I love Vue.js
I don’t think I’ve talked about it on here. I fell in love with Vue when I first saw it. Actually I created something a lot like it when I first stumbled over my dislike for React, but before Vue was popular enough for me to hear about it. I always say that you need a framework only when you are on the verge of creating it yourself. That’s where you firmly discover your need. I settled for a bastardization of jQuery and Mustache - that’s how much I disliked React.
I understand React, and really I cut my teeth on it as my first all-encompassing JS framework (“but it’s a library” - not when you use Redux, React Router, and the millions of little packages you need to make a React app work), but I just genuinely hated… well… everything about it. It was partly the naming schemes for events (“componentDidUpdate”, “componentWillReceiveProps” - these are terrible!), it was partly that there was essentially no way to progressively implement it into an existing website, partly because you pretty much can’t use it without Babel and everything that entails, partly because the documentation was barely workable, partly because Facebook, partly because they keep changing major things, partly because Hooks aren’t actually a great software development solution, partly because they add feature that never become official (suspense anyone?), largely because everything in React-land is so verbose and involves a lot of typing, partly because the ecosystem is so fragmented and there are actually too many bad choices you can make with libraries and application design that will create terrible programs, partly because JSX is strange and feels very non-standard, and partly, finally, because I really just have my preferences and React isn’t what I prefer. I dislike it. To be a little more fair, the docs have improved, the lifecycle events have evolved a bit, and the code required to make it go has been getting better thanks to functions over classes and the Redux Toolkit over plain Redux.
I really do “get” React - function call in, HTML out. It’s just that Vue is better, faster, more efficient, more obvious and predictable, easier to work with, the tooling is better, the first-party libraries are better, and the happy-path to success is very easy to find. If you’ve ever worked with React and wondered if there’s anything better, there is.
So Vue is my preferred front-end. I like it in the browser as an included script like jQuery. I like it in a manual Webpack that does just enough. I like it wrapped up and intertwined with my back-end. I like it in a full standalone CLI. I love that it grows with whatever project I have for it. Vue is really great.
My preferred back-end
Years ago I swore by ColdFusion. I mean, it was the best thing going in 1998. Way better than… what did we even have back then? ASP. PHP. JSP. Nah bro. Allaire Macromedia Adobe ColdFusion was definitely the easy path. I mentioned a while ago how my lil’ company has been moving us off of that - and for good reason. We can get the same job done in other platforms. They’re different. There’s something about googleable stackoverflow questions that make a lot of platforms work for you. I set out to find out what was up with .NET, and found my way into .NET Core. I’ve always been a fan, as C# was a pet language to me.
A couple years ago, a couple of us met with Damian and some of the .NET team as representatives of the hundreds of ColdFusion programmers at my company. They were really nice, listened to our feedback, showed us some interesting things coming up, and gave us help getting started on converting a 100 year old company to Microsoft’s software stack. It was nice. So I’ve officially jumped ship and have been coding up all of my APIs in .NET Core running on our private cloud over the past few years. It’s been very successful.
Something I didn’t expect though, that I should have seen coming, is that the .NET Core stack has really just become a thin middle layer between a database and a complex UI. Sure every app is different, but we’ve moved a lot of complexity into JavaScript.
I have a little advice for ColdFusion coders. Immerse yourselves in OOP and FP - there are reasons programmers talk about this all the time. In the CF world, you can get away with doing pretty much anything, but in C# your hands are bound - in a good way, but a challenging way. Learning object-oriented programming and functional programming today will pay off both today and tomorrow. Your CFML will be better, and your non-CFML will be better and you’ll be able to switch more easily.