Clinton Lee
Software Developer, Architect, and Consultant
First Post
Posted on
When working for a company you tend to choose components based on stability, performance, and efficiency. Which one will help you get the job done quickest and cleanly without slowing down the system considerably.
I make decisions like that quite frequently at work. But this site is not for a company, there is no deadline to get this out. It is for me. So my selection criteria for this site is quite different to criteria I’d use at work.
So why have I just finished developing my own blog engine for this website? And what’s my rationale for choosing this technology stack?
Partly because of the time.
If I was to start skinning a blog and tweaking it to how I want, I’d probably start fighting against it at some point to make it fit in with the rest of the site.
To create a blog engine like this is quite simple, I can do it in my spare time, learn new technologies (see below), and have it fit in with everything else on the site.
But mainly because I like playing around with new technologies.
I could have just grabbed a blog engine from elsewhere (dasBlog, Jroller, etc.) They have every feature I want to use in a blog engine, and probably more. But this is a site created by me, about my technical goings-on.
Half the point of this site is so I can share my experiences learning new technologies, etc. There are a few technologies I’ve had an interest in that I haven’t had the opportunity to do anything with in a work environment. So an obvious solution to this is to make something with these technologies.
Since I’m going to make something, why not something I can use? Oh, I know, a blog engine.
Why did I choose component/platform/language ‘X’?
Some technologies I just enjoy using. For example, when I began playing with the idea of building this website, I was a mainly developing using a Java technology stack, so I decided to build it in C# as I love working with multi-paradigm languages.
Some are selected based on price. I chose AWS as my platform because it has a price of free (well for the first 12 months) for a single instance. This was quite attractive to me as this site is just a hobby (at this stage). The only money I’ve really spent so far is the purchase price of this domain name.
Others are selected because I want to experiment with them. For example, MongoDB and Mono were selected because I really had no experience with them so it was a great opportunity to learn about them. They have also turned out to be technologies I enjoy using and have been very cost effective (again, free!).
What’s next?
I still have the CV section to go on this website. I really don’t want to ‘double-handle’ data entry here, so I’m going to look into integrating with the Linked-In API.
I will also document more of my experiences and ‘gotchas’ for various technologies I’ve used on this site, at work, as well as experimenting with.
Hopefully some of the information can be of benefit to you.
About Me
My name is Clinton Lee. I am a software developer, architect, mentor, and consultant.
I have worked with a variety of languages and platforms and decided it was about time to share my experiences here and let you know a bit about my professional career.
If you are interested in my services for architectural development, mentoring, consulting, prototyping, etc. Please feel free to contact me.