My name is Matthew and I’m the owner of devfright.com. Just before I explain what the purpose of the DevFright website is, I’ll quickly give a brief introduction about myself and what I do and what I am in the process of learning.
I live in the north of the UK and own my own business. I provide technical support as well as write content here and create software. My wife and I have five children.
Why DevFright
Early in 2012, I decided to start learning to program to learn how to create apps for iOS devices which includes the iPad, iPhone and iPod touch. I had very limited knowledge of programming at the time and had only briefly done one class a week back in the early 90s learning Pascal. Since then, the most I had done was debug a few PHP scripts to keep my blogs up and running. In other words, I still classed myself as a complete beginner, so much so that I didn’t really even know where to begin although I learned a lot over the course of that year.
DevFright exists so that I can document what I learned, as well as how I learn as well as share advice on what are some good ways to do things.
At the end of 2019, I began learning PHP for several months while creating APIs. For this, I started using a custom framework for building APIs. Shortly after, I moved on to learning Lumen, then Laravel, and then creating APIs using GraphQL with Lighthouse PHP.
Until October 2020, DevFright.com was purely dedicated to creating iPhone apps. I began with Objective-C and then, a few years later, transitioned to making tutorials in Swift. Since October 2020, the types of articles and tutorials have expanded to include anything software-related that I am working on, as well as my thoughts on software engineering.
A brief history of what I have learned: *note that some dates are roughly estimated.
- The 1980s – Copied code from programming books and magazines to get them to compile on an Acorn Electron, then a Spectrum 128k +2.
- 1993 – I looked a bit at QBasic.
- 1994 – I began learning Pascal at college. Didn’t take it any further.
- Early 2000’s – Dabbled with HTML.
- 2006 – Started a gadget blog which used WordPress with traffic growing to over 1 million page views a month. I needed to learn a little bit of PHP to debug problems with plugins.
- 2012 – I began taking courses in iTunes U – particularly CS106A.
- Early 2013 – I began a C++ class.
- 2013 and onwards, I began learning Objective-C and started creating iOS apps.
- 2016 – Started a Software Engineering degree at BYU-Idaho.
- 2016 – Started learning Swift.
- 2019 – Started working more seriously with PHP
- 2020 – Began using Lumen, Laravel, GraphQL, and Lighthouse.
- 2021 – Back to creating content on DevFright and learning SwiftUI, then to Python, Vue.js, and Svelte.
- 2022 – Switched over to C# and .NET
- 2024 – Moved back to iOS app development, although I still work on a C# and .NET project in my spare time