I'll tell you about how an ordinary Kazakhstani guy decided to become a programmer, moved from one technology stack to another, and why he eventually chose Java. First of all, I am writing this text to debunk the myth about the difficulty of changing a working tool.
Formation history
Before talking about changing the stack (I'll write about this in detail in the second article ), I want to share my story. I decided that the story would be incomplete without her.
I have been interested in technology since childhood. The magic for me was to insert a plastic piece into a tape recorder and hear the music play. Later I became interested in electricity. Once I tried to fix a faulty carrier, having watched how my uncle, an electrician, did it. Electrical tape, a knife and my ingenious idea to connect wires to each other led to a short circuit, knocked out plugs and a couple of slaps from my mother. In 2007, when I was a seventh grader, I got my first own mobile phone, the Nokia 6151.
After a couple of months, I already wanted to make some kind of analogue of the tegos.ru website. The phone had only WAP (oldies, I think, they remembered), and I didn't have a computer with the Internet. But I was still looking for options to implement the idea. I came across a wap-site constructor wen.ru - the most primitive, but this was its peculiarity. So I had to learn WML markup - an XML extension for WAP. Yes, at that time there was already xHTML, but I still did not understand anything.
Found in the archive :)
I made a website, which mainly hosted useful links for Nokia owners, and also found a service for organizing a chat. This is how the mini-party of Nokia fans began on the site, which contained only a couple of dozen pages. Here I met many like-minded people from Belarus, Azerbaijan and Russia. By the way, if there is someone from that party here, please respond in the comments.
The next stage of my technical evolution is sites with registration forms, guest books and feedback forms. The main feature in them is the abundance of colors and background images. Here I got acquainted with xHTML and PHP4. By this time, I had a computer - a bakery based on an AMD Athlon XP processor, 2GB of RAM, 128GB of HDD. It was bought by my mom's boss, who noticed my passion for technology. In 2008, a used computer cost 18,000 tenge (now it is about $ 40). My journey into the world of real programming began with reading a bunch of articles about PHP, and I started writing code to find solutions to various problems.
Already in the 11th grade, I was engaged in freelance projects of applications in PHP, and from the second year I found an official job in a small IT company engaged in product development. It was necessary to program in C #. To pass the interview, I created and completed a test task for myself: description here , code here . It was implemented in PHP, thanks to the seniors, who at that moment just wanted to understand if I could write in at least something.
Later I started going to conferences and our competitors noticed me. The guys lured me to a company whose main language was Java. The reason for my transition was my interest in new things and a desire to experiment.
Then a couple more transitions from company to company, our own gamedev project, work on a service management system (MRO or MMS) with the active use of RFID technologies. By the way, in this project, my colleagues and I created a framework for the framework, which the leaders allowed us to bring to OpenSource. The code is here .
Now I work in Beeline Kazakhstan, where we write in Java, but I realized that I was ready to tell the whole story of my transitions from language to language. Perhaps it will be useful to someone.
My first .NET project
I came across .NET at my first official place of work: a small IT company cooperating with the oil industry. My first project was about calculating the operating time of pipes in oil wells. I got a working sample implementation of this idea, written in ASP.NET, .NET 4.1. Honestly, then I did not understand at all how these technologies work.
We have a project that works, but we cannot build it.
I spent a whole week unsuccessfully assembling the project, after which I decided to contact a senior developer for help with building. It wasn't easy. Now you can think of this as a huge problem in classic ASP.NET about the convoluted system of binding dependencies.
After assembly, another surprise awaited me: the project provided an interface for loading an excel file. To read, he launched a full-fledged MS Office and ran through the cells, reading the values into memory. After reading into memory and performing calculations, the application reopened Office and wrote down the cell data. Yes yes, directly a graphical application through interoperability.
I was shocked, because I was told that the project is already working and you just need to deploy it to IIS under Windows Server. This is where my real acquaintance with the .NET world began.
Naturally, nothing worked on the server. The reason is obvious - the IIS server does not have access to the graphics subsystem, and therefore cannot launch anything, including interacting with the desktop.
Rolling up my sleeves, I started looking for a solution to how to call the graphical Office and parse the excel file manually. So I mastered the OpenXML library, which was not easy for me, but quickly solved all the issues. Now the file was parsed using OpenXML, after which the data was saved to the database. The output data could be obtained in the form of a report with the necessary filters.
I was very glad that I was able to remove the crutch as a June.
.NET over time seemed to me an even cooler technology, and I completely stopped writing in PHP. At some point, he began to participate in disputes and discussions about the coolness of this or that technology, and spoke specifically for .NET. Now my opinion has changed.
The worst thing that I had to face was development for Windows Mobile on the .NET Compact Framework. By the way, this was within the framework of the company I wrote about above. Such projects were so difficult to develop that the senior constantly replied to our manager "it's impossible" to a request for any feature :)
In general, I liked the C # language and the .NET platform, but I will write in detail about all the pros and cons in the next article . There I will also tell you how many times I went from stack to stack, and why I stopped at Java.