In 2015 a new website, Advent of Code, was launched that introduced an advent calendar of programming challenges. The programming challenges at Advent of Code seem pretty well tailored to learning a new language, and because of that I decided to learn a few with the three years of challenges that have been published so far. The first one I picked to learn, Elixir, is billed as a highly concurrent functional programming language with the beautiful syntax and readability of Ruby.

One of the best things about the ASP.NET stack is the ease of scaffolding new web applications. Productivity is king in the ASP.NET world, and HTML markup is no exception in Visual Studio. By using the tools available to me (Bootstrap, jQuery, Visual Studio w/Intellisense), I was able to mimic the JavaFX forms from the Software I project quickly and easily. However, ASP.NET is a full stack framework and there’s going to be more work involved in sending data to the Razor views to show data on the page.

I recently finished the first version of my email micro service. The Emailer micro service, written in PHP with help from the Laravel Lumen framework, allows applications to send emails using pre-configured settings saved in a database. This application is useful for small office environments that need notifications to be sent out for various reasons. Documentation for the application can be found on Github, and I hope you enjoy using it!

John Sonmez runs a website called Simple Programmer, and he’s written a book called “Soft Skills: The Software Developer’s Life Manual”. Being a software developer myself, I thought I would read this book to see if it lived up to the expectations that the title elicits. Having since read the book over the course of a few months I can say with some certainty that the book is _a _software developer’s life manual.

I’m going to write today about the dangers of not knowing your software stack and how it fits in with your personal computing setup. When I started this blog series I had not yet graduated from WGU, and had only just finished the Software I project. I also spent a lot of time setting up a container specific workflow that was based on the turnkey solution that I found in the Visual Studio 2017 .