First Article

My name is Rob Brodie and I am a developer. Welcome to my new web site built with Gatsby.

I plan to use this web site to share development lessons that I learned from years of building data-driven products.

I will also share news on the projects that I am developing.

My target audience is developers and hobbyists who share the same passion for building something cool. Development is more than just something I do for my job, it is my hobby. When you cut me, I bleed code. I still remember the excitement I felt when I built my first app! All that power at my finger tips! So many possibilities of what I can build.

Development Lessons

Web site and software development has seen many advances recently. As I write this article, a new JavaScript library was probably published! It is awesome to have so many tools to build your projects. However trying to learn new technologies at the bleeding edge can be intimidating and a little overwhelming. Some tech has a fairly steep learning curve. Before investing my time in learning something new, I want to know my time will be well spent. It is important to make sure this tech will delivery value to me directly by improving my developer experience or indirectly by improving the user’s experience.

When I evaluate something new I ask:

• Can I save myself time?
• Will my code scale as the project grows?
• Will I be able to deliver modern features in an easy way?
• Is this technology being actively used?
• Is this technology being actively developed?

By answering some of these questions, you can decide for yourself how deep down that rabbit hole you want to go.

I hope to shed some light on some of the tech that I have used. My lessons will go into the details of how to solve common use-cases and some edge cases. Many technologies already have a wealth of information about getting started, fundamentals, and contrived examples. I hope to fill some of the gaps in learning/training material.

A small list of some tech that I will get into: React, Styled Components, CSS, HTML, JavaScript, GraphQL, C#, Dapper, databases, micro-services, architecture design, UI Design, Gatsby, and many more.

Projects

I have a few projects I am working on and plan on releasing soon. I will use this web site as the main source for news for these projects. Some of these projects will targeted for the general public and some will be tooling for developers.