It's hard not to be at least a little cynical about "be passionate" messages. On one hand it's true. On the other hand, it's almost like saying "be brilliant."
How to Stay Relevant as a Web Developer
11–20 of 35 posts
Re: How to Stay Relevant as a Web Developer
#12This scares me.
Right now I'm young, single and almost no responsibilities. I love doing what the article suggests, keep learning new stuff, etc., but I'm not too sure I can keep it up for the next X+ years.
And within that time my life could get much more complicated, not to mention the whole industry would keep on changing faster than I can manage, and add to that the unfortunate side-effects of aging.
The older I get, the harder I have to work to remain relevant.
Re: How to Stay Relevant as a Web Developer
#13SOAP? Jesus. I think his list is behind the curve; a modern web dev would want to learn:
- Javascript, Javascript, Javascript
- Frontend: Backbone / Angular/ whatever MV* framework takes your fancy
- Backend: restful web services, good APIs. MVCs like Rails/Django if you can't push that stuff to the client.
- CSS pre-processors (SASS, Less, etc). Using classes instead of IDs, for modular, re-usable css. OOCSS ideals and methodologies.
- Dependency management via AMD / requireJS.
- Templating (underscore, dust, hogan, etc.) be it client or server-side.
- Page performance (PageSpeed Insights, Chrome Dev tools, etc) - to get content on the page ASAP, in seconds. On that note, to keep up with the Velocity web perf conference.
- Monitoring and Analytics - Real User Monitoring, Synthetic Benchmarks, A/B testing, Dashboards
- Fast development pipelines through something like Mimosa
Re: How to Stay Relevant as a Web Developer
#14Everyone has their own experiences, but from my view as a freelance web developer constantly working with new clients, I don't see much of this happening. All of this depends on who you are working with though.
SEO: You don't need to know any more here than what you have needed to know in the past. Just make sure that you are sticking with your part of the basic webmaster guidelines.
Design in general: Nobody is going to ask a developer who can't design to do design work. That includes UI / UX design. That would be quite silly. Though the developer should probably be able to code the front-end plumbing in addition to the back-end.
HTML / CSS: You should know all of this, but back-end developers generally don't have to do most of the heavy lifting here. It's very easy to hire someone to turn your PSD's into HTML / CSS and then the back-end devs can take it from there.
Build or join an open source project: There are a certain number of people who can benefit from this (you get paid for it by a company which benefits from the work or you are planning to offer paid support for your product) but I believe that projects outside of paid work should pull (or at least try) their own weight in paying for time that went into building that project. This could be money back or it could be utilities which make life easier for you.
Fast moving industry: Not really. Technology in general moves fast, but web development is painfully slow. Part of this has been browsers (and probably the standards groups) holding things back. We can't outrun the caboose.
Lots of people willing to take your job: Really? Where are they? We are supposedly competing on a global level (outsourcing) but I just don't see it. Even when I do have to compete with much lower cost developers, those developers are usually invisible and I never have to worry about them. I live in the Philippines and there is very little web development talent here (partially because all anyone cares about is sending texts.) I imagine much of the rest of the developing world is like that as well.
There are a lot of barriers to entry. Freelancing is difficult on the BUSINESS end, not the technical end. Good English and writing skills go a long way. Much of the technical side you can pick up quickly, but the really be functional enough to be worth much to a team requires a lot of time.
Most important is that you really only have to be good enough to stay a bit ahead of the masses. That's not hard.
One great way to nail all of this stuff is to build an app on the side and ship it. Monetize it, do the SEO, get traffic, etc. You will learn a lot from this process, and you will cover almost everything you need to know as a web developer. You might also make some money from it.
Re: How to Stay Relevant as a Web Developer
#15Everyone has their own experiences, but from my view as a freelance web developer constantly working with new clients, I don't see much of this happening. All of this depends on who you are working with though. SEO: You don't need to know any more here than what you have needed to know in the past. Just make sure that you are sticking with your part of the basic webmaster guidelines. Design in general: Nobody is goin…
> It's very easy to hire someone to turn your PSD's into HTML / CSS
This is definitely true, however things are a little more complicated ... it's not the actual writing of the HTML/CSS that bugs me, but the fact that a PSD is static and often is not accompanied with guidelines on how it should be used.
So for instance if the width of the design is 960px, what are you going to do? Keep it static while centering it on page? What background color should you use? (ever noticed that many designers simply forget about the background around the page?) And also, it's much better to make it dynamic, especially in this age of mobile browsers - so what should you resize? Should the side-bar also resize? By how much? Should it be capped at a max width? Should it fall at the bottom if the total width is too small?
The big problem is that the dynamic parts should also be part of the design. I mean, sure, give me the PSDs because I can do a better job at writing clean and optimized HTML5 and I'm pretty efficient at it too, but I also want an HTML to see it live. It makes my work easier and also it shows me that you've thought about the dynamics at play, so I don't have to fill in.
Re: How to Stay Relevant as a Web Developer
#16This scares me. Right now I'm young, single and almost no responsibilities. I love doing what the article suggests, keep learning new stuff, etc., but I'm not too sure I can keep it up for the next X+ years. And within that time my life could get much more complicated, not to mention the whole industry would keep on changing faster than I can manage, and add to that the unfortunate side-effects of aging. The older I…
> The older I get, the harder I have to work to remain
> relevant.
The more you know the easier it gets to grasp new stuff — because it is rarely fundamentally different and you can easily see patterns and where it fits.
Just like with languages—the more you know the easier it gets to learn a new one.
Re: How to Stay Relevant as a Web Developer
#17If spending an hour a day reading industry blogs and learning a new language or technology every month sounds like work to you, then it’s time to start thinking about an exit strategy. I disagree with this. It could only be true for a very small subset of web developers (freelancers who are working in a variety of languages for many clients), and even then it smacks more of post-hoc justifications for activity like r…
>Then there are many small web developers who make a good living installing, customising, and maintaining CMS systems like wordpress for a wide variety of clients. They don't need to change technologies every month [...]
I've done a little work in this space.
WP changes, plugins rise and fall, UA's come and go, devices spawn ever more variants, SEs adjust algos, design moves to a new focus, customer expectations alter. The technology changes constantly, if you sit still then offering a quality service becomes impossible.
The background is the commoditisation of web site creation using massive web hosts with automated installation and templating systems. Add in the availability of off-shoring of design and coding, eg via 99designs and similar systems. You have a price squeeze, massively increased competition and a continuously rolling variation in the tech.
Personally I don't think it's possible for a single dev to address all the necessary issues any more. Keeping pace with the changes needed to produce optimised and efficient sites is no longer possible as it has been in the recent past.
The field is maturing, this is an expected effect. I'm looking, as I re-enter the field, to pivot in to site optimisation as a bespoke B2B service
Re: How to Stay Relevant as a Web Developer
#18I do not agree with the overall point. In order to stay relevant you have to build stuff and in building it, you have to constantly improve your techniques, while dealing with scalability (of development, of features, of a bigger consumer base, of growth in general).
If you do that, the other stuff will come naturally. I hate learning new tools. That hasn't stopped me from hitting every single bullet on his list and my list of technologies I worked with is probably bigger than his ... but I learned in response to challenges I faced, not because I feared that I'm no longer relevant (what an awkward notion btw). I couldn't give a damn about what the popular du-jour tools are - I only read about them in passing, then later if I have a concrete problem, maybe I'll remember something about tool X and then I'll go check out if it solves my problem or not.
So basically I consider it far more valuable being able to recognize pain-points, being able to say "this sucks, I need something better" and then act on it. Being able to say NO to certain tools, paradigms and platforms is also a valuable trait. I'm pretty sure that right now developers that worked with and invested time in learning ASP (the original) regret making that choice, especially since far healthier alternatives were available and that are still relevant today. Common sense and good taste should reign supreme (not mentioning a general preference for open-source, but that's another topic for another day).
And that's the healthy attitude. Learning tools and protocols for staying relevant will ensure that you will end up outdated, while the developers that focus on learning about algorithms, design and business will be with us for a really long time.
Re: How to Stay Relevant as a Web Developer
#19SOAP? Jesus. I think his list is behind the curve; a modern web dev would want to learn: - Javascript, Javascript, Javascript - Frontend: Backbone / Angular/ whatever MV* framework takes your fancy - Backend: restful web services, good APIs. MVCs like Rails/Django if you can't push that stuff to the client. - CSS pre-processors (SASS, Less, etc). Using classes instead of IDs, for modular, re-usable css. OOCSS ideals…
That sounds more inline with the jobs I've seen floating about for web-devs recently, although there's probably plenty still relying on the good old tools.
Re: How to Stay Relevant as a Web Developer
#20The cycles are so much shorter now that what you were doing last year is antiquated, and what you were doing 5 years ago will get you fired.
This isn't true in any other field of software development. Has the author not wondered why web development is in such a state of flux? The answer is that the whole concept is a hack - using a document markup system to deliver applications was a poor reinvention of the old thin client idea. Any programmer worth his salt could see this, and so all the early tech like PHP was 'designed' by people who couldn't design. Since then smarter people have tried to fix it, but it's still layer upon layer of hacks, which is why it requires entirely new hacks every year.