Thomas Farla

From the very first line I fell in love with this prototype based language. It allowed me to quickly create dynamic web pages. However, javascript has a lot of quirks and gotcha's. This lead me into an entire new world of angular, emberjs, react, coffeescript, livescript, nodejs and eventually Meteor. I have been programming both professionally and as a hobby in javascript for about 5 years now and everyday I love it even more.

I remember being in class where the teacher explained how to create a simple web page using HTML. The assignment was to create a page which had a background colour, an image and a title. My site was bright yellow with some sample images. Even though this site was worthy of the 90's. It got me excited about what more HTML is capable of. Since then I have written countless lines of HTML and am getting excited about the next big thing. Web components!

Being a full stack web developer means that the apps I create need to be visually appealing. This is where my journey learning CSS began. At my job I learned quickly from working with different designers and reading from several different sources on best practices.

PHP is the first programming language I learned and have a vast track record of using. My first big PHP project was while working at Sedna Software. The project is called Vuurwerktoppers and it is an ERP that allows firework distributors of all sizes to manage their business under the wing of the biggest firework distributor in the Netherlands. The application handles everything from ordering fireworks in China to selling it to the customers. My second big project is an information distribution system for hospitals and universities based in the Netherlands and Germany. Using a graph database allowed the administrators to create fully customizable surveys where they choose the path the participant was going to take on a per question basis. In order to get the new question. We had to parse the answer and apply the predicate supplied by the administrator. This is where I created a small arithmetic programming language which, given a context, would tell which question is next.

Meteor has been my eye opener. Everything seems so simple in Meteor and even after developing applications for over 2 years. I still learn new things. Currently I am working on creating 88 web applications in 88 days. My progress can be followed on my webiste http://farla.io/. I am on day twenty! I love Meteor and love to mentor others.