Another reason for one to have side projects. With those, one has virtually an unlimited supply of innovation tokens to play with.
Choose Boring Technology (2015)
41–50 of 297 posts
Re: Choose Boring Technology (2015)
#42As relevant as ever. It's fascinating how big web stacks are these days, even for small-to-medium sites: various combinations of at least one styling language (SASS/LESS/CSS), frontend framework (Angular/React), frontend language (JavaScript/TypeScript/Node.js), backend framework (Django/Express/Spring/Rails) backend language (Python/Ruby/PHP/Perl/Java), and message bus (ZeroMQ/Redis/RabbitMQ). That's just the fronte…
Most of these things are actually necessary, though. Other than the frontend framework and language, basically all of those layers have been required for decades. You literally can’t make an “app” without either a frontend or backend language.
Re: Choose Boring Technology (2015)
#43Boring tech is subjective, it depends on the team. A tool for the job needs to be in right hands to be right. Some may be fine with 1 hour after hours deployment, some may want a fully automated CD pipeline.
Re: Choose Boring Technology (2015)
#44This makes sense until I need to find a new job in 18 months.
There are more Java and C++ and Python jobs than Go or Rust or Typescript jobs, and I doubt that will change in 18 months. By the time new languages become the new industry standard, most developers will have had plenty of time to learn them. I've never heard of an industry change that happened so fast that it made the majority of working programmers obsolete in 18 months.
I think the lesson here is "don't be a commodity"?
In this light, PHP coders are real commodities. They are paid lowly, treated as expendable, and get no respect by peers. I think they're going down the same path of "HTML experts" which were once lucrative business in early 1990s.
Java/C++ programmers fare better because (I guess) there is some fundamental difficulty to be proficient at them. So, despite being old and boring, being good at Java or C(++) is still a good business.
Learning Go/Rust is another way to avoid being a commodity. Although they have a smaller job market, employers need to treat you with respect, because they can't easily find another worker with a matched skill in the market.
Re: Choose Boring Technology (2015)
#45Job description these days become reflection of complexity in new age tech stack. Know C++/Java/Scala/Enter_Your_Lang_Here with python and React/Angular/Blah/Blah with Big Data Technologies - Hadoop, spark, etc. with Docker/K8 and with Azure/GCP/AWS. It is time consuming process to become expert of one thing, requires couple of years of continuous focus. I don't know How many people are actually expert of all these a…
I think this is largely representative of the real problem in web dev - the tech has changed, the complexity has grown, and yet the expectation that a web app is still something one person can build on their own using all the modern approaches hasn't changed.
You can still make something that works on your own, but not using all the new tech. You have to compromise somewhere. The notion of "full stack" devs is long gone. Making modern web apps is a team sport. You literally can't be an expert in everything you need to build a robust, scalable, fast, accessible web app anymore.
Re: Choose Boring Technology (2015)
#46As relevant as ever. It's fascinating how big web stacks are these days, even for small-to-medium sites: various combinations of at least one styling language (SASS/LESS/CSS), frontend framework (Angular/React), frontend language (JavaScript/TypeScript/Node.js), backend framework (Django/Express/Spring/Rails) backend language (Python/Ruby/PHP/Perl/Java), and message bus (ZeroMQ/Redis/RabbitMQ). That's just the fronte…
I don't know that necessarily correct. Previous startup I was at had a stack like this: - Frontend: Vue + Typescript - Android/iOS App: Vue (NativeScript/Capacitor) + Typescript - Backend: Node + Typescript - Database: Postgres - Deployment: Everything in Docker containers I know of a lot of places taking similar stances where the frontend and mobile apps are done in this way (IE React and React Native) and then you…
Seconding this. I have the same experience.
Re: Choose Boring Technology (2015)
#47SPAs (single page applications) aren't boring yet. we really don't know how to do this well, as a community, and the cambrian explosion of JavaScript tech is almost all around trying to make this extremely un-boring application style more boring. The SPA is a gateway drug to spending lots and lots of innovation tokens, more, really, than almost any dev team can afford. For example, I would consider each of Webpack, P…
React has been around for 7 years. ES2015 has been around for 5 years. React has become the de facto lingua franca for front end development. Could you imagine some CTO or technical lead saying, "We're not going to use React because it's too new and unproven." React has proven itself. Facebooks has 100K+ components. There are no unknowns there. Using jQuery or vanilla JS instead would be way more problematic and have…
i'm still under the impression that SPA are still not very good for SEO ( unless you also add server side rendering ability, which is probably a bit more involving and "not boring").
is this still a valid concern as of today ?
Re: Choose Boring Technology (2015)
#48As relevant as ever. It's fascinating how big web stacks are these days, even for small-to-medium sites: various combinations of at least one styling language (SASS/LESS/CSS), frontend framework (Angular/React), frontend language (JavaScript/TypeScript/Node.js), backend framework (Django/Express/Spring/Rails) backend language (Python/Ruby/PHP/Perl/Java), and message bus (ZeroMQ/Redis/RabbitMQ). That's just the fronte…
I don't know that necessarily correct. Previous startup I was at had a stack like this: - Frontend: Vue + Typescript - Android/iOS App: Vue (NativeScript/Capacitor) + Typescript - Backend: Node + Typescript - Database: Postgres - Deployment: Everything in Docker containers I know of a lot of places taking similar stances where the frontend and mobile apps are done in this way (IE React and React Native) and then you…
[deleted]
Re: Choose Boring Technology (2015)
#49Choosing boring tech ensures fastest GTM.
Re: Choose Boring Technology (2015)
#50As relevant as ever. It's fascinating how big web stacks are these days, even for small-to-medium sites: various combinations of at least one styling language (SASS/LESS/CSS), frontend framework (Angular/React), frontend language (JavaScript/TypeScript/Node.js), backend framework (Django/Express/Spring/Rails) backend language (Python/Ruby/PHP/Perl/Java), and message bus (ZeroMQ/Redis/RabbitMQ). That's just the fronte…
Most of these things are actually necessary, though. Other than the frontend framework and language, basically all of those layers have been required for decades. You literally can’t make an “app” without either a frontend or backend language.
You're saying exactly what the message above states - either, or. It is totally possible to have a boring JS stack, or a boring Ruby stack, or a boring Python stack. And for most of use cases, that is more than enough. One of the best examples is Basecamp, but only because it has a very strict frugality around technology, which, as we see, pays off in the long run.