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2017 Year In Review

Abhith Rajan's 2017 year in review.

Abhith Rajan
Abhith RajanJanuary 01, 2018 · 8 min read · Last Updated:
2017 Year In Review

Last year on my appraisal form, under objectives for next year (2017), I put the following,

Work on projects using technology .NET CORE, Angular 2, Typescript 2 - Inconclusive

I did work on Angular 2 & Angular 4 and Typescript a little as part of my side project which is in Ionic. But that isn’t enough and I didn’t find time for .NET Core, basically, I was giving time to let it get mature enough since initially SignalR etc weren’t supported. Now I really need to focus on it since am a C# guy.

Apart from the above, I did learn/tried some other, some of which are

  • Umbraco
  • Vue
  • Xamarin Forms
  • React Native
  • Sitefinity
  • AWS

Umbraco

In my knowledge, Umbraco is the best free cms in the .Net platform, and yeah, I am using it for this website. Last year or so when my manager asked me to update our existing custom CMS for the upcoming projects, I suggested to try Umbraco since one of my colleagues have experience in it, and he agreed. That was a turning point for the company. Now for most of the small-scale projects, we use Umbraco.

Vue

Vue is our number one choice when it comes to client-side programming. It is because of its easiness to use, structured code etc. Some of our flagship products are built using Vue including Digital raffle draw and Socialboard.

Xamarin forms

Learning Xamarin forms was just personal and we don’t use it in the company since my current company focused on Web for now.

I had a personal project piggyvault.in, and for its mobile application, I used ionic. The app built so faster since ionic was very easy because of the knowledge I had in AngularJS. After few months, I fall for Xamarin because of its native nature And I tried Xamarin Android first,

it was tough but I did little of my ionic app in xamarin android, then I tried Xamarin Forms, it was also little tough at the beginning but later I got the rhythm and I managed to build around 20% my ionic app and I was really impressed with the look and performance of my Xamarin Forms app but the downside was, when comparing it to the Ionic, the amount of code we had to write to make it work, and the build time to see the output in a simulator and few other which I mentioned in one of my post here (also I didn’t have a powerful machine), it was so much time consuming compared to ionic and when we do it in the free time we had, the time counts. So I moved to react native.

React Native

Initially, I thought React Native is like ionic, but I was wrong after I realized the native nature of React Native. I started learning it and along with it started working on my react native version of my piggy app and now it is around 30% done compared to the Ionic version. Learning React Native, redux etc was tough since I was new to react even. But I picked the pace once I figured out the component nature of it’s and it’s really cool. And things like EXPO are so cool that, when we start to try with the expo, we will figure out how much time did we wasted in Xamarin to build and see the output in an emulator, wherein expo we see the instant result in our own device. Also now there is live loading app for Xamarin forms which I tried during my Xamarin forms time but didn’t work for me the way expo worked. Later I ejected from expo to have OneSignal integration in my react native app. Using OneSignal for push notifications is so easy, all the mobile apps Ionic, Xamarin Forms and now React Native have OneSignal integration and it won’t take much time to integrate.

Sitefinity

After we tried Umbraco, it becomes the primary cms solution, and we used it for most of the websites last year, and custom cms for complicated applications. But we received a requirement to built one website in Sitefinity and yes we did. So far I like Sitefinity more than Umbraco, and yes Umbraco is good for small-scale projects. I loved the easiness to localize pages and things in Sitefinity and there is a ton of configurations and all, still learning. The project which we worked now on UAT stage, so far good.

AWS

We used to host most of the apps we make in Microsoft Azure or other third-party hosting providers, never AWS and last year for a client we had to host in AWS and we did. Honestly speaking, the name of things and UX experience of AWS is too low compared to Azure. My comparison of AWS and Azure experience is in the draft, will publish soon.

Get a new designation (Senior Software Engineer / Project Manager / DevOps Manager) - NA

I wasn’t able to achieve this since there are no such positions in my current company. And the one above me is the IT DIRECTOR.

Learn product management - inconclusive

Apart from some video tutorials, and reading knowledge. Nothing more I learned. But I am doing it with my knowledge, for Socialboard, raffle, and for other projects. I want to learn it properly so that I can do it properly.

Mentor more

I learn/try first and pass it to the colleagues. In case of Vue, AWS, Sitefinity and all, the same happened. I like to do things in the more organized way,

we initially used Asana for task management,

Slack for group communication, Skype for vocal communications and that’s too many tabs in the browser. Now we use Bitrix24 for all, it has task management, group communications, and vocal/video calls and more. I introduced it to the company after trying myself and it was a good change. I always appreciate people for their goodness. My colleagues make fun of me for saying thanks to them for the little things they have done for me. It’s part my nature. And the same way sharing my experiences and thoughts with my colleagues, when they are in a mess, they seek my advice and I tend to have a solution in every situation. In the middle of last year, I started PR reviews, and now it’s part of our workflow for major projects and no comments received for any of my code and I did correct/improvise my colleague’s codes and did appreciate when I see the good code.

Contribute more to Open Source

If you count the stars I have given in GitHub for others projects, that’s too much contribution in some way to courage them to continue their good work. Other than that, this blog is one of my initiatives.

Apart from the above, there is a couple of things. One of our flagship products digital raffle draw system went live. The other product Socialboard is getting its momentum, and the feedback app also went live.

Last year I received (1000/6000) *100=(1/6)*100 = 16.6667 % raise. And I did perform well. Our team delivered around 8 new projects including two new products and maintained around 20 old projects. Talking about the experience in the company, it was floating, lows and highs. My working time is 10 am to 6 pm, Sunday to Thursday and 10 am to 2 am, on Saturdays. The Saturday half day work is the most annoying since I believe developers need 2 days off so that they can sharpen their axes and get a fresh start from the next week. And the startup nature of the company, ie too many works, few resources. Time, quality, cost at which time is the main constraint for the projects we got, that way controlling cost. But we have to deliver quality as well. As everyone knows, these will not work well and so the work pressure. Handling minimum of two-three projects 95% of days for the past year.

It needs to change, hoping for a miracle.

And that’s that.

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Abhith Rajan

Written byAbhith Rajan
Abhith Rajan is a software engineer by day and a full-stack developer by night. He's coding for almost a decade now. He codes 🧑‍💻, write ✍️, learn 📖 and advocate 👍.
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