Ask HN: Moving from tiny websites to serious tech skills? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: Moving from tiny websites to serious tech skills?

#21

Post by hackandtrip » Sun, Dec 26, 2021, 2:41 PM UTC

After ~2y of professional experience, I don't think that there is huge hard skill gap between non-professional and professional devs.

The biggest thing is understanding that you may work on a single tool in ~10/100 people, so you must develop and work with other people in mind. So, modularity, enforcing code clarity and writing good tests, understanding product decisions and so on... Personally, I learnt this stuff on the job pretty fast - still newbie, but can autonomously solve medium/complex projects without senior help, which should be a base goal.

Larger-scale technologies is mostly larger-scale organization - just apply to one of those and I am sure you'll catch up fast

Re: Ask HN: Moving from tiny websites to serious tech skills?

#22

Post by krisoft » Sun, Dec 26, 2021, 2:49 PM UTC

I don’t want to discourage you, but why do you want to learn these “large-scale” technologies?

Tools are tools. They solve some problem. Many of the large-scale companies have problems you as a single frontend developer might not. If we better understand what is your motivation maybe we can better advise you which techniques are worth your time.

Are you interested because you would want to join a big company? Then it is a question of how to get a portfolio which you can use to get through the filters.

Are you interested because you have trouble keeping up with some aspects of your solo developed projects?

Are you perhaps feeling that your simple solutions are bad just because they are simple? In that case it is important to know that what is best practice for a team with 200 developers might be a terrible waste of time for an individual.

Re: Ask HN: Moving from tiny websites to serious tech skills?

#23

Post by fayazara » Sun, Dec 26, 2021, 2:55 PM UTC

I think the best way to achieve this is to either join a tech heavy product based team or keep building side projects and I mean like proper projects and make a saas out of it. This coul cover a lot of use cases for you.

Re: Ask HN: Moving from tiny websites to serious tech skills?

#24

Post by getup8 » Sun, Dec 26, 2021, 2:59 PM UTC

I’m a fan of just learning as you go. It sounds like you’ve built relatively simple apps so maybe try to build something more complex, even if a “stupid” idea.

Try React or Vue with some database component and go from there.

And before you start, look up a resource for how to write good tests with the tech you choose, and work on that as you go as well.

Good luck!

Re: Ask HN: Moving from tiny websites to serious tech skills?

#25

Post by have_faith » Sun, Dec 26, 2021, 3:02 PM UTC

Being autodidactic myself the best method I've found is to simply over-engineer your personal projects for the sake of learning. I have side projects that I've never even launched that are built using whatever I could find as "best practice" for solving that particular problem at scale.

Re: Ask HN: Moving from tiny websites to serious tech skills?

#26

Post by vmception » Sun, Dec 26, 2021, 3:04 PM UTC

bad_interivewee wrote: post #13

johncoltrane wrote: post #2

You won't get there if you stay solo, so get hired, join a team and learn as much as you can from your peers. Large-scale is team-scale.

how does one simply “get hired” while being mid career with no professional sw experience? asking for a friend.

incorporate your software company

list a couple clients if you can

point out that you’ve been working for that (your) software company for several years as a senior software engineer

pass bullshit brainteaser problems

viola

Re: Ask HN: Moving from tiny websites to serious tech skills?

#27

Post by Pandabob » Sun, Dec 26, 2021, 3:20 PM UTC

I'll give this a shot:

1. Learn React and Typescript. React has taken root in the enterprise and it seems to be the frontend equivalent of Java.

2. Learn about CI/CD: Github Actions is a good starting place. If you're hosting your projects in something like Vercel, try running separate staging and production environments.

3. Look at popular open source frontend projects. The newly released Supabase dashboard[0] seems to be a pretty good starting point to figure out modern best practices. Excalidraw is another[1].

4. Frontend masters has some pretty good courses regarding React and enterprise Typescript. Would give those a try (the price is $39/month).

5. Where I'm from (Finland) Spring Boot (Java/Kotlin) seems to be the most popular backend framework. Node and Python frameworks share the second place. If you want to learn backend, I'd suggest picking one of those three. Rails if you really want to.

6. At some point you'll probably want to work with AWS. If React is the Java of the frontend then AWS is the Java of infrastructure.

7. It's never a bad idea to know SQL.

[0]: https://github.com/supabase/supabase/tree/master/studio

[1]: https://github.com/excalidraw/excalidraw

Re: Ask HN: Moving from tiny websites to serious tech skills?

#28

Post by MichaelRazum » Sun, Dec 26, 2021, 3:24 PM UTC

johncoltrane wrote: post #2

You won't get there if you stay solo, so get hired, join a team and learn as much as you can from your peers. Large-scale is team-scale.

Have to agree. Especially in the beginning, it is important to have some experienced devs around. Later you could try to go on your own, but very difficult in the beginning.

Re: Ask HN: Moving from tiny websites to serious tech skills?

#29

Post by nowherebeen » Sun, Dec 26, 2021, 3:26 PM UTC

krisoft wrote: post #22

I don’t want to discourage you, but why do you want to learn these “large-scale” technologies? Tools are tools. They solve some problem. Many of the large-scale companies have problems you as a single frontend developer might not. If we better understand what is your motivation maybe we can better advise you which techniques are worth your time. Are you interested because you would want to join a big company? Then it…

This. Websites are just marketing tools to sell your product. Unless your product is the actual web-app, I would steer away from learning complex technologies. They tend to come with their own operational overhead. When in doubt, follow the KISS principle.

Re: Ask HN: Moving from tiny websites to serious tech skills?

#30

Post by johncoltrane » Sun, Dec 26, 2021, 3:33 PM UTC

bad_interivewee wrote: post #13

johncoltrane wrote: post #2

You won't get there if you stay solo, so get hired, join a team and learn as much as you can from your peers. Large-scale is team-scale.

how does one simply “get hired” while being mid career with no professional sw experience? asking for a friend.

Web agencies would be a good start.

Expanding on the above… I work at such a place and our bar for recruitment is a lot lower than that of more snooty companies principally focused on software. If you can demonstrate potential then it will be relatively easy to get in. From there, you will start working on projects larger than what you are used to, that _won't be_ "the next $FAMOUS_THING" while still offering plenty of learning opportunities.