Time flies – obviously – since it is +4½ years since my last post. One can easily say: “oh now he’s going to revive is blog again” and do you what: you’re absolutely right! Will you see more posts in the future? Sure. Will it be more frequent? I hope so.
The main purpose of this blog, is to be a kind of notepad for all the things I experience. Things that I think would be of interest if not to me (when I need to remember things later on) then to others.
I’m a die hard .NET developer, I comfortably create large solutions in C# and have been doing such for many years – how ever to keep developing yourself and as a consultant you need to stay sharp – and force yourself out of your comfort zone.
As fullstack developer (contractor) I’ve been heavily involved in every aspect of the development process, that being backend, frontend and testing in all sorts of businesses. So what would stepping out of my comfort zone be? That would be exploring other alleys than the .NET one. Pushing my self to develop on other platforms, in other languages, using other products and technologies will of course challenge me.
Being able to see how others outside the Microsoft .NET ecosystem solves problems, would greatly enhance not only the ability to solve problems using other technologies but also to contribute the .NET based solutions with new ideas/solutions. Not to mention the obvious side effects such as: the interesting part of learning new things and increasing my value of being a contractor (with broad technical knowledge).
So as you can probably imagine, the time between my latest post and now has of course been used on various customer projects (as of always) but also challenging myself with other languages.
I’ve had a dedicated Windows server running in Canada for quite some years, with iWeb has hosting company. Nothing bad to say about them, but after 3 years I found out I could cancel my server – rent a new one, faster/bigger and for less. Though the cost was slowly increasing, licensing for e.g. SQL server and alike. Yes, neither this blog or my company site is in anyway high traffic sites.
On the Windows server platform I hosted my blog and the company site using Orkestra C1 CMS (formerly known as Composite C1 CMS). A platform that actually did the job pretty good and at the same time being .NET-friendly.
But to cut down on the hosting costs, I needed to be more pragmatic: price over technology. As much as I hate to admit it, the software license fees was really taking a big percentage of the costs. For a rather static environment, just serving web pages I’ve now switched platform from an unmanaged dedicated Windows server running Orckestra C1 CMS (which I still really much like) to a managed WordPress cloud hosting, currently at Flywheel.
The manouvre of changing technology/platform and hosting provider, resulted in annual expense reduction of app. $1500,- though, admittely funnier to code C# than PHP – hence funnier now to pay the bills.
