I haven’t published since April because I’ve been afraid. I also avoided social media, news aggregators, and discussion forums for months. I’m done letting fear stop me. What was I afraid of? In this post I detail every single thing I’ve avoided admitting on this blog.
Tag: C#
I’ve been writing code for money for 17 years, but I’ve never used C# or any other .NET language. That’s changing—I’m learning how to be a full-stack developer. There are almost too many books about the platform, so I had to choose a few to focus on. I started by reading the front matter: the title, cover, foreword, preface or introduction, and table of contents of 26 different books. This was enough to compare and choose the 2 books that I’ll read as soon as possible. I also made a list of 7 books that I’ll read once I’m familiar with ASP.NET and Blazor. 6 more books made my “someday” list—I have no specific plans, but I’d like to read them eventually. At the end of this article I’ll reveal exactly which books made the cut. But first, here are my thoughts on each book.
When I learned lean software development, I abandoned year-long planning at work and at home. This year, I broke my rule. I made a New Year’s resolution. I decided to broaden my skills so I could ship a full-stack enterprise web app completely on my own. No back-end developers, no product managers, no UI designers, and no vibe coding. Since I wrote Ruby years ago and Rails is having a Renaissance right now, I wrote down the following and taped it to my bedroom door:
In 2025, Kerrick is a Full-Stack Programmer
Develop & deploy Ruby on Rails apps, covered by automated tests, to real users.
I’ve been programming for over two decades, and I can’t make a full-stack enterprise web application.