About me
Who is behind this blog?
I, Cédric Mauquoi, am a big fan of modern technologies. I am not afraid of failing while trying, as long as there is a lesson to be learned from it.
At this point, I am a professional developer, with a fairly strong bias on Backend languages. My current job description is Dev Lead of an agile team of 7 Full Stack developers. I did not start out on the typical path for a Software Engineer though. I am technically a mechanical engineer with a specialization in Robotics, Systems and Control. However, as life has taken me along in an unexpected ride, I have discovered Software Engineering and have decided to make my career in that field. I am most attracted by how fast one can have an effect in this field, as opposed to traditional engineering, where projects often take multiple years. This does mean though that my entire knowledge was collected on the job. As such, mistakes will definitely be made, but, if it were easy, it’d be boring…
Potentially, the biggest challenge of this entire endeavour will be the styling. The hardest task I can imagine is the statement to make it beautiful.
So join me on my ride to a working Web Application that is built entirely by one person. You may know certain fields better, but there are no unicorn coders, so there just may be something to learn for everyone!
What is the purpose of this blog?
The journey will describe the ups and downs of a developer as he tries to get a Web Application running by doing everything himself. The reason for doing everything by myself and not distributing work on others who may be more skilled in certain fields is simply to learn. Any good developer will know how important it is to have knowledge in multiple stacks, even if he is not directly working in it. Additionally, new technologies will be incorporated as the project grows. Developers are familiar with pet clinics or other throwaway projects that familiarize them with something in 1 hour of work, only to never be seen again, and ultimately forgotten. This shall not happen here!
To me however, there are also ulterior motivations. Like any good developer, I am a bit lazy. Since this project is done in my free time, I use the pressure of blogging about my progress as a motivation to keep on working on the application also.
Finally, the end of the journey should be a working application that will be used by me, and potentially, by many others also.
What is the application about?
I’m glad you asked. In short, the application is a money overview tool. I was born and raised in Luxembourg, studied in Singapore, the US and in Switzerland, where I currently reside. So I have accounts in multiple currencies. As a big cryptocurrency enthusiast, I also own bitcoin, ether, and the like. I am also dabbling in stocks or shared real estate investments. So whenever I try to determine my net worth on my self-made excel sheet, it is quite error-prone, takes a while, and most importantly, it’s just no fun. Any graphs that should be pretty are annoying to maintain and not pretty. Any inputs are manually inserted, nothing is automated.
This application is supposed to resolve as many of these problems as possible.