Ask HN: How does a 1990s web developer get back on track?

Since you've done PHP and MySQL previously, if you still remember how to use that, it's worth starting with a simple PHP micro framework (like Slim, or maybe Symfony 3). That will teach you about using URLs for routing. (If starting from scratch, pick a language, and pick a micro framework for it: Ruby => Sinatra, Python => Flask)

Get comfortable with that, and then create a route that sends back information in JSON instead of HTML. That will then give you something to try Ajax against.

Also, learn CSS. The Web switched to CSS for layout in 2001-2004. Have a read through 24ways.org -- their advent calendar for each year, it's nice bit size bits about modern web development. CSS for layout. Responsive design (basically adapting to various browser window sizes and screen resolutions). If you want to learn how to lay out a page in CSS this is essential, but if you want to get up to speed just building stuff, then taking something like Twitter's Bootstrap is a handy starting point.

Also, jQuery. Learn about using events properly, and keeping JavaScript in a separate file and hooking into the browser/document events you are interested in. jQuery is the starting point for getting your head around Unobtrusive JavaScript.

If you are interested in getting your head around static HTML/CSS sites first, it might be worth pulling up a Jekyll tutorial and following that. (Jekyll is a static site generator. Markdown documents rendered as static HTML using the Liquid tempting language)

So, it turns out that going by the responses to @neLrivVK's question that this opinion of yours is in not in any way controversial. In fact I think it would be a great topic to have a poll about but first we'd need to agree on what to put in the poll :) Straw poll suggests that at least 50% say, "stay the course but tweak knowledge".

Of the tech that the OP listed two things are _not_ hipster.js front end libraries or frameworks, and I wish I had mentioned them in my other response below.

1) Bootstrap: This is a huge productivity boost for CSS. You get a responsive layouts, a standard way to do grid layouts and it papers over browser differences and compensates for older browsers. OP says they don't use much CSS, that really doesn't cut the mustard in 2016. And, hey, Bootstrap is made by those guys at Twitter† (not 3 20-year-olds in a coffee shop as you so amusingly put it!) so they probably know a thing or two about UI layout and design. I'd be interested to know what % of websites now use Bootstrap or something inspired by it. Bootstrap was released as open-source in August 2011, it'll be 5-years-old tech this year.

2) jQuery: This is a huge productivity boost for JS. Of course you can use that hipster tool Vanilla JS (http://vanilla-js.com/) but jQuery is so concise, the syntax and semantics are well thought out, again papers over browser differences. You can chain operations together. The way it does selectors is brilliant. John Resig basically had some sort of divine inspiration. That fact that he was 14(?) at the time of writing it... well... that's how one learns to be humble in life. Sure raw JS is going to blow jQuery out of the water perf-wise but going by what OP says, dev time is what we're optimizing for here, jQuery will be plenty fast. It's used* on what, ~ 70%..90% of websites? I'm surprised a version of it isn't built into browsers yet. jQuery is 2006 tech, it's a decade old this year. (Also released as open-source in August, hmm).

† and Angular is Google tech, React is Facebook tech, Rails is 37signals tech but all have have huge open-source communities.

* http://trends.builtwith.com/javascript

Bootstrap was released a decade after this guy stopped doing webdev. This is the kind of stuff he needs to know about, and why the whining about "hipster" stuff isn't useful.

He is looking for the basics of modern development. The stuff you consider solid, reliable, time-tested, (non-hipster) tech came out years and years after he stopped doing web development.

Prefacing this with "I'm in my 20s and don't know what development was really like in the 90s", but I want to suggest an alternative approach...

It looks like the thing that has changed most is not the languages and frameworks (you can still use PHP, MySQL, effectively), but actually the deployment.

Automated deployment, continuous integration and delivery, and cloud services like AWS seem to be the bit that has changed the most.

If I'm wrong, ignore me, but otherwise, I'd have a play around with something like Ansible, use a few AWS services, some of the more value-add ones (i.e. not EC2 or S3) to see what you can now get "off the shelf".

Get up an hour earlier than you do each day. It's hard when you start, but if you don't have much spare time then it is the best way to keep up with the industry.

Spend this time updating your knowledge base via. tech news, tutorial/e-course sites such as Udemy/Pluralsight (if you learn best by video-and-code) or official textual documentation/guides otherwise.

Learn about version control (Git), HTML5/CSS3, ECMAscript 6... PHP and MySQL are still fine. Read guides about modern practices such as mobile-first development, testing via. Chrome developer tools, file minification/concatenation etc. Just learn a little each morning and don't feel overwhelmed!

Consider the points of the following link and don't worry about the "flavour of the week" libraries so much and you'll be fine -> http://programmers.stackexchange.com/a/46760/74224