I am Amber Harbarger, and I am a Senior Software Engineer with about 9 years of software engineering experience. I have spent most of my career up until now working on and supporting .NET applications. Over the last year, at my most recent job, I’ve been working on translating my experience from one object-oriented language to another, Java. My employer does allow .NET in some very specific cases, however, is still a mostly Java Spring shop.
I want to track things I’ve learned over the years and share them with a larger audience. I started my software development career doing build administration and owned the source control and CI/CD methodologies as a junior developer. I used this knowledge and nurtured my natural curiosity to expand my skillset beyond just software development best practices to also major upgrade planning. During my time as the build administrator, I led the charge to move from subversion to GitHub, upgraded our build tool version from an older version of TeamCity to a newer version, and also assisted in leading the charge to move from manual deployment methodologies to using an automated deployment tool Octopus Deploy.
Throughout my career, I never stopped learning. When given the chance, I dove head first into learning AWS, and got my AWS Certified Developer certification back in 2018 when the company I was working for first started an AWS journey. I like to build solutions in my free time outside of work to further improve my skills, and I like to use AWS as an easy way to manage my production environments for my projects.
As I continue my journey, I’ve decided to embrace the change and realized after a year of fighting it, that I should embrace the change and grow my skillset. In reality, I’ve hit the realization, that programming languages are just tools, and there are times when you might want to use one versus another. There is never a perfect solution, so extending my skillset will only make me a better engineer. Right now, my goals are to learn to use Java Spring using Gradle for builds, and then I want to also learn to use React using Typescript. To do this, I am creating a new version of an existing project that I built using .NET/C# and translating it to a Java Spring API with WebSockets and then a React SPA front-end. I am excited for this journey and hope you follow along as I catalogue my journey.