Kirk Lashley

I've been using core Javascript since the early introduction of it with my first websites in 1995. I've built a number of my own JS libraries over the years and have complimented by JS skills with jQuery and AngularJS. However I believe knowing core JS allows me to simply recognize jQuery, Ember and Angular as libraries and frameworks that are all built upon core Javascript.

I've been developing webpages since 1995, with the introduction of Windows 95. With HTML5, HTML is somewhat cool again, a markup language that has finally come of age with the semantics that Jeffery Zeldman and the A-List-Apart folks have been dreaming up for over 10 years.

Once upon a time the LAMP stack was the cool kid on the block. It was the Ruby on Rails darling of the internet. PHP still has a warm place in every web developer's heart from the early 2000's. I've built custom CMSes, entire websites, and single page sites all in PHP. There's object oriented PHP, and get it done PHP. Now the cool kids are using Laravel instead of LAMP, and Docker on EC2 instead of Linux and Apache. Either way, PHP is here to stay as a part of the Internet.

I'm a bit of a late comer to Android development. I built my first app in 2011, and released my first commercial app, WeDeliver for Drivers in 2013. This app was used by over 700 independent contractors, utilizing background services, location-based updates, connected to a RESTful API and managed photos and the GPS. I also designed the app with Android's design patterns. I'm more familar with latter versions of Android, having developed for Gingerbread (2.3+). And most recently updated our apps for Material design with fragments, for Android Lollipop. I'm pretty good at Android UI design and development as well, and could help you create UIs in XML or pure Java code. Android design patterns are also something I enjoy, since I could bring some favorite core Java design patterns over to Android.

I've been using Java since 1.2 back in 1998. I built a database in core Java as well as an early course management solution. If you remember programs like Blackboard, I built an early version of a competitor in 1999, while the space was wide open. I've worked on over 90 Java web applications, and a couple Swing apps (using Webstart) over the last 17 years. I'm currently using Java 8, and consider myself a JVM programmer. The modern Java programmer is a polyglot, with a little bit of core Java here and there, with Scala, Groovy or Clojure as a DSL of choice. I personally favor Groovy, since it's the language used in gradle. There are amazing things you can do with the JVM now. It's more than just Java. If you wanted to write Ruby you could as well with the JRuby library. The JVM is a big wide ecosystem, and almost* any language you're familiar with can find a home here. I'll be happy to be your guide.

SELECT me FROM other.codementors; Yeah, I like SQL. Would you like to JOIN me?

jQuery is a great library that everyone should be using. I've written my own JS libraries for my own use over the years, and I tossed it when jQuery became stable. Delegating the cross browser-incompatibilities to the library allows you the developer to focus on the logic and not the quirks of a certain Microsoft browser. So saying I use jQuery now is a bit of an understatement. Sometimes I have to go into the source code to see what they are doing (in core Javascript), if things don't work just right, but the library is documented really well.