Laravel

In January I wrote about moving our frontend from AngularJS to Angular. That migration is still running — we are on Angular 4 now, which shipped in March and turned out to be a painless bump from 2.4. The bigger shift landed on the backend: our APIs used to live in Laravel, and we are rewriting them in Java with Spring Boot 1.5.3. This is my first real Java project. I have years of PHP — mostly Laravel — and a few months of TypeScript from the Angular work. I also wrote C# in college, which turns out to matter more than I expected. Java does not feel like learning a foreign language. It feels like meeting someone who speaks a dialect you half understand. ...

I started my programming life in a different world. Back then, Visual Basic 5 and 6 felt like magic. You could drag a button onto a form, double-click it, write a few lines of code, and suddenly you had a working Windows application. You did not start by arguing about architecture. You started by making something useful appear on the screen. Later came AutoIt, classic ASP, small server-side scripts, admin tools, automation helpers, and a lot of “just make it work” programming. Some of it was ugly. Some of it was clever. A lot of it lived longer than expected. ...