Reaching For The Top With Toptal
Over my 15 years as a developer I've worked with a lot of programming languages and frameworks. One of, if not the best, things about being a software engineer is that the industry standards are always changing and the best developers want to adapt. I can't ever see myself dedicating everything to one language or framework, but a few years ago I found a beta project by Microsoft call ASP.NET vNext (now know as ASP.NET Core) and my life as a developer changed forever.
I'd used ASP.NET 3.5 and 4.5 many times in the past. Durring my 5 years developing for the oil industry I used .NET and Sharepoint exclusively. One of the biggest advantages of .NET is its integration with Visual Studio. But Visual Studio, as well as finding reliable IIS hosting, was expensive back in the mid '00s and the price point wasn't worth it for me to buy it on my home computer. Consequently, I never took .NET side projects; I was a PHP cavalier. But in March of 2015 I stumbled upon ASP.NET vNext version 0.4. The solution structure of the MVC templates looked incredibly clean. I could have a Bootstrapped web app with a user log-in system deployed to Azure in less than 5 minutes. I knew this new .NET framework was going to change the way I could help my clients realize their goals in unpreccedented time.
Another huge change to my business strategy was how much Microsoft Azure had matured. I had used AWS since 2010 and I had mastered that development stack, but it was slow and took a lot of steps to get something simple up and running. I stayed with PHP, Zend Framework and AWS until ASP.NET launched their first official release which became known as ASP.NET Core 1.0. Within two months, I was able to leave my full-time job and focus soley on freelancing. Within the span of 1 year I launched 25 new web applications of various sizes and complexity. Business was booming and I stayed up on the all of the changes to .NET Core, constantly adapting my applications to run on the latest versions. Each project maintains the highest of security standards and speed and my clients are extremely happy with the performance. That was nearly 4 years ago, and I am still on top, out performing every other out-of-the-box web application systems on the market.
This blog is not meant to be a fluff piece for Microsoft or .NET. Instead, this is something I truly believe in and I am very passionate about this product because of what it provides my clients. Keeping projects steamlined and fast are two things that mean a lot to an independent developer with few to no other developers to work with. I strive to deliver the highest quality products to whomever I work but working effeciently can mean taking some short-cuts. This short-cut does not suffer a lack in quality.
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