It’s a bird; it’s a plane! No, it’s just the latest installment of the Developer Spotlight Series, where Developers serve as the Hero of our story. We sat down with , a web application developer and JavaScript evangelist. Check him out on , and enjoy the Q/A. Cosmic JS Phil Andrews Twitter Medium I’m relatively new to the game, having started writing software a little less than three years ago. I needed some custom software for my company. The problem was that I didn’t know exactly what I wanted but I knew how expensive it would be to have someone else build it and then always have to contract them back each time a change was necessary. So I decided to learn how to do it myself. How long have you been building software? I started with , then , then . Haven’t looked backed since. In fact, I’m shutting down my previous company at the end of this month in order to split time between freelancing and personal projects. Swift Python JavaScript If it made sense I wouldn’t leave the Apple ecosystem. The tools (Xcode), the language (Swift), they’re just too good to not love. Particularly when they’re paired together. It’s very impressive the power Apple has put behind their IDE. What is your preferred development stack? But in the real world / / are my everyday tools. JavaScript, written everywhere developers want to be. That really should be it’s tagline. For all my backend needs I use AWS. They handle all of my database, server, and storage components. My IDE is Atom. Again, if it worked the same for every language you can’t beat Xcode. Node Express React The second thing that I built was far too complex for my skillset. A multiplayer iOS trivia app. It came complete with matchmaking, global leaderboards, complicated game logic (It was more like chess and less like Trivia Crack), and almost the entire suite of mobile add-ons from payments to geolocation to push notifications. I was in over my head. Which was great as it forced me to learn an immense amount in a short period of time. The app, landing page, preview video, I wrote everything. It was a big weight off my shoulders when that came to a completion. What past projects are you most proud of and why? If I want to use all of my JavaScript toolbox to put together a beautiful blog, where should I store my content? I’m going to need to retrieve and update large portions of it frequently. Plus it needs to have rich-text editing and preservation capabilities built-in to the dashboard. Talk a little bit more about your process for building apps in your world and vertical. The answer is the place where it takes the fewest lines of code to retrieve your pre-formatted content in a manner that is simple and flexible to work with. That is a single endpoint that returns a bunch of objects (all of my blog posts) or just one object (one blog post). It’s at the top of every object page in . Sending a get request to it will return a JSON response object that includes all of the associated content and metadata. And for me specifically, post body content is delivered in HTML form so it can be directly injected into a page. Cosmic That link being at the top of the page is great design. Copy and paste it into any browser and you can see the JSON object instantly. It makes testing and debugging very quick. Two input boxes below that and there’s a full-powered editor. It toggles between WYSIWYG and straight HTML formatting. That allows you to easily add in custom classes or tags. To top it all off is platform agnostic. I can write a post once and access it from anywhere. One fetch request, one post. Or, one fetch request, all my posts. I don’t need to incorporate anything else into my project. No add-ons, no downloads, just a simple and effective content delivery system. Cosmic It was a few hours before I stumbled on . But as soon as I played around with it for a few minutes I stopped searching. For content management of a blog or portfolio I can’t think of a better system. I’m already thinking about how to incorporate it into client projects since the interface is friendly to developers and non-developers. Cosmic I have bit hook, line, and sinker on React for frontend work. The next big project I’m working on is a dual-platform React Native app so I’ll be wading even deeper into those waters. To me, the really interesting stuff is in the world of AI. Self-driving cars captivate me. The idea of not having to drive places will have a profound effect on society. I’m a full proponent of “If it can be automated, it should be automated”. What are some technologies you are excited about that you are using today, or want to learn more about? The personal project I’m working on right now relies heavily on machine learning. The more I incorporate it the more I realize just how far off we are from the AI we are all fictionally familiar with, i.e. Jarvis from Iron Man. The main problem is in processing power. I believe that we won’t get a stellar AI experience until we develop a new kind of CPU. But I digress. We’ll get there. Even just the fraction of AI that we have right now is really useful. Cosmic JS Developer Spotlight Series Developer Spotlight: Jason Price Developer Spotlight: Abe Hendricks Developer Spotlight: Brian Mullis Developer Spotlight: Micah Walter Developer Spotlight: Joe Tuson Developer Spotlight: Coding Dojo Developer Spotlight: Simple Media Developer Spotlight: Jon Kalfayan Developer Spotlight: Jon Bloomer is an API-first cloud-based content management platform that makes it easy to manage applications and content. If you have questions about the , please reach out to us on or join the community on . Cosmic JS Cosmic JS API Twitter Slack

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Developer Spotlight: Phil Andrews

Developer Spotlight: Phil Andrews

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