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Ask HN: Self-taught webdev with lots of free time. What should I learn?

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Re: Ask HN: Self-taught webdev with lots of free time. What should I learn?

#91

Post by yboris »

thatcodingdude wrote: post #68
gitgud wrote: post #52

Have you considered open-source development? [1] All the languages and libraries you've listed are open-source projects started by someone like yourself. > "having done every type of CRUD under the sun - what do now" You have a lot of experience developing CRUD, why not build something that alleviates the pain of CRUDdy development. What annoys you? What sucks and could be done better? Anyway, just a thought. Good lu…

I'm far from being good enough to contribute to open-source projects unfortunately. I can make lots of things work but I don't know enough advanced patterns and low-level stuff to contribute in a meaningful and maintainable way.

I think the barrier to contributing to open-source is far lower than you imagine. There is, for example "good first issue" tag on many repositories (search Google for terms like "awesome for beginners" etc).

One example, I recently contributed to chokidar - something that is used by webpack, VS code, etc - fixing a bug that prevented network path access, and all it took was a conditional statement to handle the edge case: https://github.com/paulmillr/chokidar/pull/1025

Re: Ask HN: Self-taught webdev with lots of free time. What should I learn?

#92

Post by krzepah »

Try functtional programming using ramda.js to step up your js skills; try putting up a prom & grafana stack for monitoring, try using something like django & drf for your APIs (django is somewhat a large web dev market & is really solid, DRF will make you go lighting speed on your dev, it will also step up your permissions programming skills) ; work up to 100% coverage with unit tests and then write e2e tests that reflects the specs, ElasticSearch is a valuable tool to know as well (for logging or be it to use it as a search engine for one of your projects) - get 100% score on web.dev, do not use any css template and actually master it (all that flux / grid system is still a mess for me) (use variables etc..., maybe even scss or sass to be able to loop and whatnot) ; the list could be lot longer but one thing i learnt is that iterating on architecture is a lot more beneficial than spitting out features

Re: Ask HN: Self-taught webdev with lots of free time. What should I learn?

#93

Post by rexreed »

thatcodingdude wrote: post #75
rexreed wrote: post #55

What are your goals in life?

Job-wise I'd love to find something more technical and less business/project oriented. I find myself not really caring about the end product but I love focusing on how things work. I've often been the only one enjoying debugging since it's more of a brain teaser than a business/product focus. Also the build/deploy part of dev interests me a lot. Also gotta get to a scratch golf handicap, but that's outside scope.

Maybe you should look into diving deeper into DevOps / IT Ops / AI Ops / ML Ops? And perhaps more jobs around Ops / Network / Sys admin stuff? There's a lot of need for good people who like to debug tricky problems.

Re: Ask HN: Self-taught webdev with lots of free time. What should I learn?

#94

Post by rexreed »

halfmatthalfcat wrote: post #69

DevOps, SRE, CloudOps. Things are starting to trend where full stack jobs requires knowing how to build (usually with containers) and deploy (usually into a PaaS) your application. How do you manage a build pipeline, how do you provision appliances in a cloud provider, how do you monitor your applications if shit goes wrong, etc.

Based on his responses elsewhere here, it looks like Ops / Admin oriented things would be his groove.

Re: Ask HN: Self-taught webdev with lots of free time. What should I learn?

#95

Post by krzepah »

krzepah wrote: post #92

Try functtional programming using ramda.js to step up your js skills; try putting up a prom & grafana stack for monitoring, try using something like django & drf for your APIs (django is somewhat a large web dev market & is really solid, DRF will make you go lighting speed on your dev, it will also step up your permissions programming skills) ; work up to 100% coverage with unit tests and then write e2e tests that re…

Oh and if by any chance you are not efficient with linux & docker do it !!!!!!

Re: Ask HN: Self-taught webdev with lots of free time. What should I learn?

#97

Post by cpursley »

_benj wrote: post #60
bszupnick wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any specific resources to recommend?

The postgresql documentation is actually a pretty good start (and finish!). I like learning by doing something so I took an old side project and I'm making it on PostgreSQL with PostgREST in front of it. It is crazy all the things that the DB can do! Triggers after an actions happens, virtual columns, JWT Tokens, Unit Testing...

Using postgrest and combining postgres triggers with Elixir listeners, you can then do callback like actions on the data: https://blog.lelonek.me/listen-and-notify-postgresql-command...

Or do similar using Hasura's Event system but with webhooks.

https://3factor.app

Re: Ask HN: Self-taught webdev with lots of free time. What should I learn?

#98

Post by rexreed »

thatcodingdude wrote: post #13
ktpsns wrote: post #9

Besides all kind of data science/machine learning, what about learning the "greybeard" mastering of Unix servers? This will connect a lot of old-grown idioms (think about daemons, classical TCP services, etc.) and get you a lot of knowledge in networking (which has connections to event-based networking and thus asyncio, greenlets and all that).

That's probably the most interesting part of my job ! Making some small scripts, managing the build step, servers etc. Although I'm not sure you can get this kind of job as a self-taught dev with no degree/certifications.

Absolutely you can. Just build up some real experience. Some certifications help as well. Just be careful the ones you spend time and money on.

Re: Ask HN: Self-taught webdev with lots of free time. What should I learn?

#99

Post by iainmerrick »

gitgud wrote: post #52

Have you considered open-source development? [1] All the languages and libraries you've listed are open-source projects started by someone like yourself. > "having done every type of CRUD under the sun - what do now" You have a lot of experience developing CRUD, why not build something that alleviates the pain of CRUDdy development. What annoys you? What sucks and could be done better? Anyway, just a thought. Good lu…

This is a terrific suggestion, as it adds value in multiple ways:

- working on open source helps the community generally

- it's a good way to advertise your skills as a developer

- if you need to learn more stuff in order to contribute effectively, well, that tells you what you need to learn!

Re: Ask HN: Self-taught webdev with lots of free time. What should I learn?

#100

Post by thatcodingdude »

mucholove wrote: post #82
thatcodingdude wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

C it is then. Thanks for your input.

Happy you chose to learn C. That's exactly what I would recommend. If you are so inclined, I'd look into how to write your own home-grown version of Objective-C—given that valid C is valid Objective-C. Because then you would learn Smalltalk and the whole ladder of it all! Smalltalk is far and away one of the greatest joys on programming. :) http://objective.st The "Gang of Four" explains the patterns in Smalltalk and…

Building a language would certainly be a crowning achievement. Thanks !
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