Hello and welcome to Smart Dev Now!

My name is RJ Schmertz.  I am a growing software developer that would like somewhere to write down my thoughts and ideas, for a couple of reasons.  I’ve always believed that reiterating something will help you remember it better, it can be living documentation and who knows, maybe I’ll be able to share some of my knowledge and experience with some others.

My goal for this blog is to capture information that is in my head, things that I have to learn or knowledge that I will gain as I go along.  And, to share that here.

I currently work for a pretty large global corporation in a dev shop that primarily writes services, tools and web applications on a C# .NET backend with a mix of technologies for our javascript frameworks, primarily AngularJS and ReactJS.  We have a good amount of legacy code in older frameworks like WPF, Knockout & Backbone, and even Silverlight.

We are a little bit unique in the fact that we write almost 100% of the software that we use.  We have large call centers and we’ve created all the software that keeps the call center running, from call routing and administrative tools to the actual software the agents are using, the services that handle all the data and transformations, integrating with 3rd parties all over the world to distribute that data, service bus software to handle the distributed nature of the work, internal web tools and of course a public facing website for our main product.

I feel blessed to work for a company where I get to touch so many types of software, in so many different languages and architectures.  But, as you can imagine, it keeps my mind busy.  I am constantly learning something new for every project that I touch.  Which I love!

So, that is why I’m here.  I need a dumping ground for all of the knowledge that is going through this brain of mine.  I hope to remember some more things, have some things documented, help some others learn, and maybe meet some cool people on the way.

Thanks for visiting!