Blog Reboot and Xamarin

How many blogs must there be where the author started blogging and then author just stopped posting. I never thought it happen to me. I enjoyed blogging, yet nearly 2 years ago I stopped. For me it was a new employer for whom I was hired on to work as an consultant, After being hired I was told the company was worried how its clients would react to my blog so I was to immediately stop blogging. 

No big deal I thought, I didn't want to rock the boat at a new job so I stopped blogging. Looking back now that should have sent alarm bells screaming in my head but it didn't at the time. 

Fast forward a year and I had left that job due to the stress of my employer blatantly misrepresenting itself, its bad practices and then expecting me to lie to our clients. It was a stressful time, not so much because of the clients but due to the corporate consulting culture of just placing a consults in positions that in no way matched their skills.  Just so they could charge the client those "expert consultant fees" for a just graduated novice being paid a fraction of what they charged the client.

Finding a Great Company

I left the consultant culture to work for a small company full of great people called Road Id. Its been busy but rewarding, many of our customers email Road ID to tell us how our products have really saved lives.

I have tons of blog post material I've created there the last 2 year, some highlights that come to mind. 

• Migrate to Azure from Rackspace
• Design and built a scaling back-end for the Road ID Mobile App
• Built service layer and repository pattern around Entity Framework
• Replaced internal winforms app with a Angular Single Page App

On top of that I've become a father and there is no words to describe how much I love my son nor how little sleep I got those first 3 months after he was born.  About the same time my son was born my old domain  "ChrisTowles.com" expired and someone snagged it. I tried purchasing it back but no luck. So i'm climbing the search engine ranks again with a new domain name. 

Blog's Future 

I wanted update this blog because right I have been working with a amazing technology stack that I really have high expectations of it and more importantly of what I can do with it. That technology is Xamarin and what the Xamarin team has built is amazing. 

While I'll follow this post up with more details on Xamarin the bottom line is you can build native Android and iOS apps in C# and use Visual Studio to do it. For me that means using the language and IDE I am most productive with and conformable using to make quality mobile apps. 

I expect many future blog posts on Xamarin Development to share my journey from Xamarin Novice to Expert.