With several years of experience within Software Development I’ve had the privilege of being involved in a number of development languages and systems to aid our day to day projects.
C/AL & AL
This is a Client/Server language that is used within the Microsoft Dynamics platform, my usage being with Dynamics NAV (2009 – 2018) & Business Central (On-Premise & Cloud). Its main usage is providing a system of retrieving, inserting and modifying database records held inside a SQL database.
Formed on a basis of the Pascal language it holds many similarities however with the development into Business Central the platform has become much more modern. Using many of the common methods and functions from other languages such as C, I find it a very enjoyable language to work with that’s surprisingly extendable.
JSON
This is a personal favourite syntax of mine for storing and exchanging data. A number of projects I’ve worked in involved connecting and querying third party APIs that use this syntax. Because its human readable format using a Key:Value system, its a very intuitive and visually appealing format to use.
A typical use case of this would be to query a third party API, sending in a JSON body as part of a HTTP request. We can then process the response of the request, working through the response (converting to JSON if required) and using the keys and values provided to manipulate and store them in the appropriate database records.
Notable Others
As part of a few projects related to integrating with third party APIs, I’ve created some simple handling C# .NET projects to convert data from the API and feed it back into a JSON format that could be understood by our target system. This involved handling and returning error messages, converting data that was present in invalid formats and creating my own classes so the data was easily understandable and extendable for the future.
C & C# offer a great diversity in both the integration and game development space (Unity for example), making them highly sought after languages that I’m developing to add to my skills.
Python is also quickly becoming a very simple yet enjoyable language to work with personally. Offering a simplified syntax to a lot of the common methods and functions available. Also due to its involvement with a range of tasks across the market, it’s very much a language I’m developing to work with more in the future.