SEEKING WORK | Remote | Chicago, IL | Contract | Full or part time
I'm a Chicago-based, full stack developer, and my forte is developing web-based systems that enable organizations to achieve more. With 20+ years of experience, I have taken numerous systems all the way from requirements gathering, through development, and into production.
My Dad brought the 994A home while I was in elementary school. He later became the chair of the Chicago TI Users group for a while. I learned to program on Extended Basic, made a couple of extremely primitive games. I remember dictating game code from magazines while my Dad typed them in, and also reading and analyzing other people's code from shareware text adventures like Cake and Kidnapped. We had the expansion unit with memory and the floppy drive - the fan on that thing used to roar! Played hours of SPAD, Parsec, Scott Adams adventures, and bunches of Infocom games. This brings back lots of good memories for me.
Find an experienced business person to work with. The ideal person would be someone that is successful at what they do, and that also understands the potential for technology to transform their business. It certainly helps if they have seen a software development project traverse from start to finish. And they should be someone that you can trust. If you can't find this person, find a job in an industry that interests you. Ideally, you'll eventually meet people on the business side that have a vision, and are looking for someone that can deliver technology that fulfills their vision. They're out there -- like attracts like. And, be the kind of professional that people want to partner with and it will eventually happen.
Every time that I fly now into Vegas for business or competitions, it's a matter of routine for me to drive up to Charleston peak, and the Red Rock area - it's only an hour away. It's all too easy to snub one's nose at the strip for everything that it is... I can simply say it has almost no draw for me. I invariably rent a car and head out the desert.
Beat me to it. I can vouch for this book as being completely amazing. It teaches you the fundamentals of how to see design, which in turn contributes to learning how to produce your own designs. Or evaluate someone else's. If you read only design book, this one is worth the time.
Oh, good on you for posting this. This takes me back to childhood summers spent hacking away at TI Extended BASIC trying to write my own games - with admittedly humble results. Or the evenings spent reading dot matrix printouts of other games' code trying reverse engineer the text parser. Or memories of playing Scott Adam's text adventures, the flight-sim SPAD, Parsec, Infocom's Witness, etc. Or attending Chicago TI user group meetings with my Dad - who eventually became the president of such IIRC. Or my Dad dialing up 300 baud modems to a BBS. Those were definitely good times.
Remember when people used to clap or cheer at the movies??The don't make 'em like they used to. Even with its moments of campiness, there's a certain authenticity, even nobility to Raiders. To this day when I watch the ark-opening sequence I get chills, in no small part due to John William's masterful soundtrack.
I really like KnockoutJS, having used it on multiple projects, both personal and professional. Many will say that it can't really be apples-to-apples compared with Angular since it's technically MVVM, it lacks many of Angular's features, like dependency injection etc. etc. And that's all true. But, the end result for me is that I'm able to rapidly build sophisticated client apps. I'd have to dig up the links, but there are some pretty complex front-end apps i.e. website builders and the like, that were developed using KnockoutJS.
On a previous project for our company, another dev and I were able to research and decide whether to use Angular or Knockout for a specific project. We concluded that for us, Knockout was the better choice because it seemed lighter-weight in terms of actually achieving our end goal which was simply doing reactive data-binding on the client side rather than having to do so with jQuery manually. We've since used it to create some pretty awesome user experiences that would have been a pain manually. To us, it didn't seem Angular would have been a poor choice. Rather, it was just that our goal was such that we did not need everything that Angular offers.
Knockout doesn't have built-ins to wire up UI actions automatically to CRUD calls, but the portion of that you end up having to implement is usually extremely small.
As far a wiring up objects to knockout observables you have two options:
1) use the mapping plugin. I tend to stay away from this, as it makes everything on objects observable. Not bad per-se, but I like more control.
KnockoutJS is great. It's small, simple, stable, it works on every browser, even IE6 and mixing it in with other technologies is no problem. Being able to easily read through the entire code of KnockoutJS is another big plus. I've used this on a few big projects so far and it's just a pleasure to work with.
I'm a Chicago-based, full stack developer, and my forte is developing web-based systems that enable organizations to achieve more. With 20+ years of experience, I have taken numerous systems all the way from requirements gathering, through development, and into production.
- Front end: SPA, Vue.js, JavaScript, Knockout, JQuery, Bootstrap, HTML, CSS
- Back end: C#, .NET Core, MVC, REST, SQL Server, Dapper, Entity Framework, Hangfire
- Resume: https://logicautomated.com/Senior-DEV-Resume.pdf
- Email: aleks@logicautomated.com
- Website: https://logicautomated.com
You are an organization that:
- Needs a full stack dev to help with a new or existing web app on Microsoft's .NET platform
- Needs help creating a web interface that enables your staff to get more work done
- Needs someone to parse through oodles of complex business requirements to find a workable solution
If any of these apply to you, drop me a line and let's talk!