Hi! I am Dragan, a web-developer living and working in Germany actively since 2018!
Since I can remember I was doing something on a computer. Early on, as a kid, mostly playing video games and having a not-so-great PC put me in a situation to adapt and learn to tinker around with those "cryptic" configuration files and mods to achieve a good balance of graphics and performance. This was a good lesson for a great perk that every developer should have and that is googling.
Searching, researching and adapting the vast solutions you find to achieve your goals!
As I grew older I started programming the usual beginner calculators in Visual Basic. In high school I joined my programming team and competed in some country championships. These experiences taught me how to think in code and be more flexible with choosing my programming language as we were forced to use Pascal and C++.
After moving to Germany and graduating from high school I was ready to choose my path and there was no questions asked what that would be. Germany has an amazing school system with a special kind of internship (Ausbildung) that lets you work, learn and go to school. After graduating the internship you are a full fledged developer! Starting my internship was a complete turnaround for me even if I had a strong background in programming, the real world problems and building production ready applications on the web really challenged me in a good way, showed me where I lack in skills and how to improve.
Building production ready software can be a good insight into where you really stand as a developer, skill wise.
The agency, where I started my career path, was using TYPO3 as their primary CMS. I fell in love with TYPO3 right at the start. The flexibility, the scalability and being able to deliver a enterprise grade website quickly was a perfect combination for me to start my journey. It was packed with everything you needed to get started building a "dynamic" website; Fluid in the frontend and the whole Extbase ecosystem in the backend was just the perfect combination.
My primary focus is mainly on the world wide web! Building fast, pretty and solid websites / web applications for everything and everyone. If you google now: how to make a website? You are gonna get infinite possibilities and ways to finish that task. I chose PHP for that.
PHP was the go-to and really the only thing for a web-developer, that wanted to add some logic to their website. Old PHP was chaotic and didn't have a lot of features most modern languages had. New PHP solved most of the issues and started to be fast! Learning it was easy and in combination with a good framework like Symfony or TYPO3 as a CMS, it all made more sense.
PHP without a good server is like a car without the engine. Deploying your website onto a optimized server is a must, so I started looking into deepening my knowledge into server administration. Throwing that PHP-FPM onto Apache2 with the right VHost configuration took your website from locally hosted to the world wide web! Over the years this stack moved to docker and made it more robust.
JavaScript intrigued me, but I was not sucked into the universe till recently. Started learning TypeScript, React, Next.JS and many more frameworks / languages. This somewhat new technology really shocked me in a good way. It converted some of my focus from PHP to these shiny, fast and complex ideas. I've set my roadmap and it's going great!
Here is everything from above, but in a not-so-complete list :)
- Backend Developer focused on the web
- PHP, JavaScript, TypeScript, Python
- MySQL, Postgres
- TYPO3, Strapi
- Next.JS, TailwindCSS
- Docker, Gitlab CI/CD, DDEV, PM2
- PHPUnit, PHPStan, Rector
- and many more...
Why not? I am trying to capture some of my day-to-day problems and the solutions. Most of the things I learnt came from some random blogs and stackoverflow.
Finding the right solution for a problem is good, but understanding it and adapting it to your liking is great!
Showing something cool or maybe doing a cool thing and giving it out for free didn't hurt no one! This blog is going to be a wild collection of ideas, solutions, random cool stuff and alot of tech talk.