This Old Blog

I've decided to resurrect this old blog to publish some nuggets about software architecture and development, and perhaps, if the mood strikes me, some scientific and philosophical musings. When I first posted here almost nine years ago in 2010, I had recently finished my B.S. in Computer Science and was working as a web developer for small mom and pop companies in my area. Shortly thereafter I was hired to my first "real" job in professional services as a junior consultant for a small software company, learned some industry practices, made some connections, and enthusiastically watched as large tech company acquired it. After the initial excitement wore off, I realized the culture was shifting rapidly away from what I originally enjoyed about the job and that I was working for a truly massive corporation. So a couple of like-minded colleagues and I quit, and we embarked on a journey to start our own consulting company. Many mistakes, lessons, successes, and years later our little firm is going strong, but I've increasingly felt the need to more directly refine my craft of software development. In our line of work (and in others I'm sure), it's easy to get comfortable with a subset of technologies and solutions while losing track of the bigger picture, inevitably getting stuck in the past while the rest of the industry leaps ahead.

My recent interest is in ideas that have been around for a while, some of which have seen a huge resurgence recently and some of which I'm attempting to absorb in a modern context:

• Functional Programming
• Reactive Programming
• Clean Architecture
• Domain Driven Design
• Test and Behavior Driven Development

I come from a web front-end, PHP (I'd be a happy man to never write another line of PHP!), and C# background but recently have been learning about Golang, Elixir, Docker, GraphQL, game development in Unity, various cloud services, machine learning, decentralized ledgers, [insert additional bright-and-shiny objects here]. My goal with this blog is to focus and distill these efforts into a form that's personally useful to future-me and potentially others.

Read my older blog posts on blog.bennyjohns.com