About two years ago the funding for my job was cut back and I was moved off of my project and forced into another position. This was the best thing that ever happened to my career. The environment I worked in was very disconnected from the real world. I essentially spent a good 5-6 years writing code in a cave; or maybe more like a bunker with a time lock. Have you ever seen the movie A Blast from the Past with Brendan Fraser? Well what I am really trying to say is that my coding skills sort of reached a point where they stopped evolving because the project didn’t really require it (this is a complete mistake by the way; A project should never stop evolving otherwise it begins to just spiral down ward into decay) and the rest of the world continued on its merry way growing and changing.
With funding being cut and things looking shaky around the work place I decided it was time for me to find a new job. Luckily the good folks at Lamps Plus saw the potential in me and took me in. At the time I didn’t realize it but things were going to change for me.
At Lamps Plus I spent the next year being introduced to everything I was behind on. The most bodacious and gracious Andrew Siemer (see his blog here) took me under his wing and showed me what I was missing out on. He put the spark in me that inspired a new desire to grow and get my old rusty dusty skills back up to speed. But it wasn’t to last. Andy moved on and headed out to Texas leaving me to venture out on my own.
Fast forward two more years to the present.
I brushed up on just about everything I could get my hands on. Now the last piece remaining for me to learn is MVC. In an effort to gain some real hands on experience I have decided to convert one of my older projects to this new design paradigm. I will be taking the directory website FindIt! AV and converting it from PHP to MVC.NET and switching from MySQL to MSSQL on the backend. FindIt! AV will become an enterprise level application. I plan to break things into multiple layers with MVC on the front-end and probably Entity Framework and MSSQL for the back-end. The middle-tiers and business logic will be interfaced with a service layer of some type utilizing the new Web API so we can hook in an Android mobile application as well as a Windows Phone Application. Everything will be written in C# and obviously object-oriented.
There will be much more to this architecture I am sure and I plan to document the whole process as I go along. So stay tuned!
