Who am I?
Hi. My name's Colt, and I've been a professional software engineer for 6 years now, although I've been a hobbyist programmer for much longer than that.
I absolutely love software development. The feeling of accomplishment when a new feature gets shipped, the satisfaction of a functional prototype, and the pride that comes with knowing your product is a well oiled machine.
What this series solves
However, I've got a major gripe with one part of software development: tutorials. They tell you what to do. Which is helpful, if you already understand the problem you are trying to solve. If you are new, however, the why is just as important as the what. Neglecting the why is how you end up with terrible architectures. It's how you nail yourself to a terrible design philosophy. It's how you encur tech debt.
So if the why is so important, why does no one lump that in with the what? This has led me to make a number of mistakes in my career, from bad architecture to time wasted on a temporary solution when the true problem was elsewhere.
My hope with these posts is to explain exactly why you should do something a certain way, not just what the solution is. It's worth mentioning, by no means am I a genius developer. I make tons of mistakes, and have spent many nights back tracking git to figure out when something went awry.
Constant improvement > talent
But I'm always improving, which is a far better attribute than just innate talent for development. And, I know exactly what it is like to not understand how something works. When I started programming, I couldn't understand the rationale behind loops, or basic control structures. But, given time and practice, I started to understand it. All this to say, I can explain the why in easy to understand terms. Just the answer, and the reason you should use it.
I want to give solutions to common problems, along with the why, which is the point of this site. The outcome for you: I'll use my own lack of knowledge to explain these things in dead simple terms. The outcome for me: I get to exercise my passion for teaching and engineering all at once. So let's all pursue our own journeys independently, but work together to help each other.