Console.WriteLine(“Hello World”);

As cliché as it might be, any developer blog needs a Hello World welcome post to open the dialog from us to you. Our goal is to start an informative series of posts related to the development process, from inception of an idea to deployment of a functional application. Now that we have that out of the way, on to a few things about what you might learn by following along with our blog.

A few things about the team

We are a tight-knit group of developers focusing on web, mobile, sql, and PowerOn development in Central Pennsylvania that work for Members 1st FCU. Coming from many diverse backgrounds, we all gravitated to this organization because it has embraced technology to produce internally developed applications that solve our business needs.

What we do at Members 1st FCU

We help solve business initiatives here at Members 1st FCU that provide rich (and hopefully) exciting features to our membership using the best technologies possible. We do a lot, but the best way to introduce ourselves is to list a few of the items we touch, such as:

• Online Banking, the primary member-facing application to service your account online
• iOS and Android Applications
• Programs to assist our Associates perform business actions
• Jobs to assist the business in processing
• Data analytics, reporting, trending, and data warehouses to provide business intelligence for the organization.
• And so much more, anything you can think of related to a financial institution chance is we touched it, integrated it, or even built it.

Technologies we love

We love all technology and will evaluate and use any new technology if it makes sense to build the application. However, we primarily use the following in our day-to-day lives here at Members 1st FCU

• .net framework (.net core is in our future and recently started building small applications)
• AngularJs 1.x (with a plan to migrate to Angular)
• Bootstrap
• nuget and npm, so many packages
• Ms Sql Server
• Unit Tests
• Selenium
• git
• NancyFx
• Visual Studio, Code, ReSharper, NCrunch, and more
• Octopus Deploy
• NewRelic
• Team City
• ER Studio
• Redgate
• Xcode
• Android Studio
• Azure
• Automated Testing
• Cocoa Pods

We Strive to be better

We learn along the way building these systems and are very aware of technical debt that is introduced into our applications. Technical Debt for us is anything that could be refined in our code and processes. If it is causing a headache, we need to tackle it and solve it. If this method is too large, refactor it. Is it hard to deploy? Let’s fix that! Is this application hard to build and becoming monolithic? Let’s break it up.

We love to learn

One of our core values here at Members 1st is to promote a learning environment. The introduction of this blog is another outlet for the team to share ideas and concepts with the masses.

• New ways to build applications, micro-services and APIs
• So many design patterns, the ungoing battle to keep things simple, but also solve the problem eloquently.
• New ways to perform data modeling.

What comes next

What comes next is anyone’s guess, but I know there will be new informative posts from the team sharing ideas about something new or exciting!

Welcome to the blog

-Mark Coleman

Posted by Mark Coleman