Finally, It’s Happening…

I’ve been talking about the concept of a blog for quite some time but Life happens and plus writing Code trumps writing Paragraphs. ;)

I started building a Blog out with Jekyll a while ago, “Transform your plain text into static websites and blogs.” I liked the concept, a static Github hosted blog where you write markdown. Could it get any easier? Well, not having to worry about a Theme, Comments, and all the other frills would be nice. Then I came across Svbtle, its FREE and open and they host it for you, WINNING. So this is my first blog with SVBTLE. The interface is pretty nice and it’s pretty simple.

Now a little bit about me… Hi, I’m Chris. I am a Software engineer for OneHealth on the platform team.

OneHealth is the first comprehensive online community specifically designed to help people change their behavior and lead healthier lives. Through Social Solutioning, a term that represents the next-generation capabilities of current social networking websites, OneHealth facilitates trusted connections and accountability to measurably improve the health and wellbeing of its members. - See more [here (https://about.onehealth.com/aboutus/)

I am naturally a builder. I like technology and making it work to my advantage. I believe in Automating everything… I’ve been developing code since AOL proggy days using Visual Basic. After having my AOL account shut down multiple time, and many nights getting in trouble for being on the computer so late, I had to figure out new coding avenues.

Those days have come and gone. After being a nerd in High School building computers and silly little games/applications for Windows I went to College at CSUSM for Computer Science (Of Course). This is where I learned a lot of Data Structures / Programming Paradigms / Patterns. Learning C/C++ and a little bit of Web Technology (PHP/HTML/CSS) is where I found my true passion. Web Applications. In the time from college to now, the web has evolved for the better. No more GeoCities, Myspace or Message Boards. Now we have full Stateful, Asynchronous, Real-time, HTML5, CSS3, MV*, Web Applications. These new applications aren’t a script tag in the head of your document fading / blinking / animating text, they are full fledged Single Page Browser Applications. How Neat

About 3+ years ago I decided to delve into Javascript and see its true potential. Now I code primarily in Javascript (NodeJS) with a few other Languages I like to keep in my toolbelt (Python/PHP) and occasionally C (Pebble v1). The evolution of Javascript (ECMAScript) in the last 4-5 years has been incredible. JavaScript was originally known as LiveScript and was a development of the Netscape 2 browser in 1995. Known primarily as a scripting language. It has been through many phases :

“ The "We need scripting for web pages” phase. (Netscape)
The “We should standardize this” phase. (ECMAScript)
The “JavaScript isn’t a toy” phase. (Ajax)
The “JavaScript as a programming language” phase. “ - John Resig

Thats all nice and dandy for the Browser, but what if we want to use it outside a web browser? Well great strides have been made with NodeJS. Javascript developers can now build server side, real time, asynchronous applications with code that can be shared between environments and even platforms. Javascript is being adopted in robotics, embedded boxes and even watches

Javascript is a bit obscure for someone coming from a traditional stack. There are vast amounts of frameworks and no real standardization (easily found). You can end up in a spaghetti code mess, callback / race condition hell or some scoping problem. I can’t just create a class? Prototype, what’s that? Javascript is based on Prototypical Inheritance and doesn’t have a class structure but has expressive power to simulate the classical system. Lets throw in another curve ball, it’s asynchronous by nature. All that bundled with some other quirks causes lots of confusion and distrust in Javascript. After getting passed the quirks of Javascript, the Sky is the Limit. Well and the hardware that runs it.

This blog is here for my Random thoughts, Hackery and other tidbits of information I want to write down for my future self.