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Chip has already said he's not a prodigy designer, so if he's not a front-end wizard, how are his back-end skills? 

1 Answer

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If Chip could focus on one end of the stack, he much prefers the server side.

When Chip wanted to put his Access databases online, he stumbled into the depressing world of WAMP and LAMP stacks.
Even though the learning curve was steep, he mastered enough MySQL and PHP to get his data to the client-side.

PHP was the aggravating part. What he enjoyed was learning about the data structures, types and queries he could run to create, access and transform his data.
Discovering Ruby on Rails (thanks Mark!) was a huge leap forward, especially because ActiveRecord is such a nice abstraction layer above raw SQL for almost anything you need.

Besides, focusing on Models, Controllers, and Jobs is just way more rewarding than tweaking views.

Chip's first few apps were standard Rails web frameworks (starting with Rails 3), then Ross Hunter taught him about webhooks and APIs. Chip learned AJAX and JSON as the norm became avoiding full-page loads.
 
And Chip just jumped into Turbo and Stimulus for this portfolio project you're looking at right now.

Chip has experience with:


Web Frameworks:
  • Ruby on Rails (API and web)
  • Wordpress
  • MS SharePoint (yes, but ew)

Relational Databases:
  • MySQL
  • SQLite
  • Postgres (his favorite)

Datastores:
  • File servers
  • In-memory stores (Redis)
  • Amazon S3

Servers and proxies:
  • Apache (from the dark, bitter WAMP/LAMP days)
  • Puma
  • Unicorn
  • Thin
  • Foreman
  • ngrok

Job services/processors:
  • Sidekiq
  • Delayed::Job (R.I.P)

Hosting / PaaS:
  • Heroku
  • Railway
  • WPEngine