Me, going on an adventure

I’ve been developing mostly back-end code for most of my career (Java essentially), I dealt with Java the language, the JVM, Eclipse, Java Enterprise, Databases (Oracle, MySQL, SQL Server), XML, XML Schema, etc… and I did some front-end hacking while developing some of the widgets of the XEO Framework.

I decided that I needed to do something different. I’ve always been fascinated with the front-end world (not necessarily thinking I should have done that all along, I very much like to do back-end code). I’d been reading on all the changes happening in front-end land, such as the MV* frameworks like Angular and Ember, the “recent” appearing of React (and React Native), all the fuss about node.js (io.js), all the tools like bower, gulp, grunt, bootstrap, responsive, rendering performance… a whole new world.

I’ve been fortunate enough to find a new challenge on Memeoirs where I’ve been given the task of managing front-end tasks (including our Ember.JS + EmberCLI application).

What I can say is that it’s been a very humbling experience: In a Java environment I know my way around everything, I know where to search, I’m very productive with Java. On the other hand, working mostly on Javascript for the better part of my day (and using tools like the ember-cli, or having to create my own build process using Broccoli for instance) reminds me that I’m in an incredibly huge field where there is so much stuff that you can do and learn. I’ll still have to learn CSS properly (I hope), responsive design, mockups, even my own text editor changed!

I expect an incredible amount of new things to learn, a lot of walls to bang my head against, but I think It’ll do me very good to have stepped out of my comfort zone and try new things. I believe this knowledge will be very helpful on my future (whatever that may be, because as Steve Jobs said, you can’t connect the dots while looking forward).

Happy coding!