Ansible. and maybe Puppet a bit. They allowed me to scale with my career. Going from a few hand-managed servers to 100k+ environments at ease.
Ask HN: What cool development languages/tools changed your career?
101–110 of 315 posts
Re: Ask HN: What cool development languages/tools changed your career?
#102This is such a great question. In my experience:
- Django has been simply amazing to work with. It is the framework with which I measure other frameworks. Its far for perfect, but it has the features I need. It can also be customized to most requirements. Sure, it has downsides, but they don't get in the way as badly as other frameworks.
- Angular changed my opinion about front end development. My experience had been with Jquery heavy websites. Never with something better engineered from the start. Angular has issues that I'm very aware of, but it opened up my eyes to the world of better javascript programming.
- React took what I leatned from Angular and just made it easy to use. Which was my #1 issue with Angular. It was too bloated. React is so much simpler.
- Visual Studio Code made me open up to newer text editors and IDEs. I've mostly been a Vim user. But VSC has proven to be very nice to use. I have not abandoned Vim, but am doing more JS dev work on VSC.
- The Django rest framework is super amazing. It just works so well with Django and allows me to build great APIs without a lot of overhead. I wish there was something like it for Java.
Re: Ask HN: What cool development languages/tools changed your career?
#103Building (certain) applications using in-memory persistent objects instead of using a stateless web app + database server, somewhat similar to a multiplayer game.
Made programming fun again. Don't seem to get to use it at client sites as it's too extreme an approach :(
Re: Ask HN: What cool development languages/tools changed your career?
#104React & redux. Through redux i came in touch with functional programming. During the first week learning it, i came home from work exhausted and with a headache but eventually it clicked and i was amazed how productive and bugfree further development was. I began to adapt the functional style in my PHP projects and started using real functional programming languages (Elixir and F#) to take my understanding even further. Still plenty to learn.
Re: Ask HN: What cool development languages/tools changed your career?
#105Git. I had many years of experience with various source controls systems, but it wasn't until a few months with Git that I realized it took away so much of the friction I had been living with in terms of being able to do fast context switches, experimental branches, recovery from bad mistakes, and sheer performance of working with very large repos. It is a tool I rely on and admire almost every day of my life.
Re: Ask HN: What cool development languages/tools changed your career?
#106Clojure. Before learning Clojure, I didn't even have a career. I just wanted to get into software development. But at the time, all I knew was a bit of Python. And while I could've learned Java, I figured that being yet another Java programmer in the marketplace, but with no experience and a liberal arts degree, was probably going to get me nowhere. So I decided I had to learn something emerging. Something where ther…
I'm very interested in learning Clojure. Would you care to share more of your experience learning the language in terms of learning curve, useful libraries or just general tips. I'm sure that would benefit the community at large.
Re: Ask HN: What cool development languages/tools changed your career?
#107A lot of these answers give technical reasons, but career wise it is a different answer for me.
JavaScript. Once I got a solid understanding, the ability to do so much more visually and interactively on our own projects, bookmarklets and chrome extensions for sales / business department, etc, that was when they really started to notice my value at my first tech job. They felt like I was a wizard, able to modify the features of almost any existing web tool they used.
Re: Ask HN: What cool development languages/tools changed your career?
#108I have just started using C# and .NET Core after years of dismissing it when it was only available on Windows. Now it is open source and cross platform! I come from a PHP background but have been writing smaller performance critical code in Go lately. C# is a pleasure to work with. It's got generics and good support for asynchronous I/O. .NET Core is also very good, it's dead simple to spin up an API serving backend…
Yeah, got to love how Microsoft are embracing the open source - as well as the solid (pardon the pun) development methodologies and patterns that surround it.
I have been working with Core all year, in fact started learning C# on Core RCs (which was a bit interesting..), but it was all on Windows. Finally the other day I just spun up a Ubuntu VM in Azure and got a sample Core app from my Win10 environment at home published up and running in a few hours, as step 1 on a small idea I have.
This coming from never having used Azure VMs before, and I was rusty with the SSHing / Linux as well. Not a lot of my friends would dig it, but as a relatively old timer I thought it was way cool. Microsoft code, running on Linux - definitely made my day.
Re: Ask HN: What cool development languages/tools changed your career?
#109I have just started using C# and .NET Core after years of dismissing it when it was only available on Windows. Now it is open source and cross platform! I come from a PHP background but have been writing smaller performance critical code in Go lately. C# is a pleasure to work with. It's got generics and good support for asynchronous I/O. .NET Core is also very good, it's dead simple to spin up an API serving backend…
Me too. I also came from a php background and I love the new .NET Core, Typescript and so forth. Funny is that I've always been dismissing .NET for so long and been a heavy Linux user. I never thought the day would come where I prefer .NET and Azure.
Although, professionally I basically only do frontend work or node work. So javascript is pretty much what brings in the cash each month nowadays.
Re: Ask HN: What cool development languages/tools changed your career?
#110For me it was Pyramid+SqlAlchemy - For me probably best python web framework if you want something more than CMS.
On frontend I think Polymer and Web Components are a game changer - very low entry barrier and they feel like a proper way to do web development where everything is encapsulated.