Zachary Ian Blank

PHP was my first language besides HTML. I would hack together Wordpress sites for people hiring on Craigslist. I have come a long way since then. Now I love using Laravel 5 and Composer to build REST APIs

I first started using Angular after building REST APIs for clients' mobile apps and then them requesting full featured web versions of the products. Not wanting to rebuild all the business logic of the API for views I looked at Ember, Backbone, and Angular. I am happy with my choice to dive into Angular. Over the past four years, I have developed many project agnostic modules that help me on nearly every new project.

In my opinion, MySQL is the workhorse of the Internet. Expect it to do something, and it will do it and do it and do it. There are not the config, and monitoring headaches of something like MongoDB and nearly everybody uses it. I have been using it since my early days of Wordpress hacking and learned from very well and very poorly designed plugins. Now I put a lot of thought into scalable design – both in the amount of data and the potential future data – and optimization. When paired with an ORM like Eloquent development is really a pleasure.

NodeJs is not my first choice for full applications however I think it is great for workers and other functional abstraction. I have built sites with Express before and Bookshelf ORM.

Every site I have deployed over the last 6 years has been on Ubuntu. I like the widespread support and out of the box readiness.