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Changing times for web developers

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Re: Changing times for web developers

#31

Post by jopt »

This almost feels dated, like many recent articles making the same point about web development trends. Unfortunately, a lot of this is still news to a lot of practicing professionals.

When it comes to coding in general, and especially web, I find (I admit anecdotally) that many people who appear in the know are living roughly five years in the past. In a recent discussion, a friend explained that JavaScript is an example of a strictly client-side language.

I suspect many developers are delayed by books and classes, paradoxically, even though all the information on the new sexy things is theoretically a click away.

Re: Changing times for web developers

#32

Post by mddw »

popopje wrote: post #16
mddw wrote: post #11

I'm always amazed to see how people who give advice (and good ones in this case) are totally unable to follow them on their websites. 296 http requests. 1.85mb transfered. Yslow grade D. So yeah, these are good advices. In fact, the OP should follow 'em if he wants to "survive".

he says at the bottom "And a disclaimer – don’t look at the source code of my web page – I rarely work on that, and is using an old blogger template. lol"

Quality code ages well. Old is not an excuse for crappy or slow, neither you can so easily disclaim your own code.

Would you take fashion advices from someone with horrible and smelly clothes ?

Re: Changing times for web developers

#33

Post by aberratio »

Nice list of skills that web developers should have. But the general advice "Learn Your Craft Well" has nothing to do with changing times. (The times are always changing, aren't they?)

On the content: Anoop seems to work more on the Backend side of the web and as software architect. It is not uncommon that people who are specialized on backend are not familiar with current frontend standards. So his advice might be addressed to these guys?

Re: Changing times for web developers

#35

Post by [deleted] »

bbotond wrote: post #26
TazeTSchnitzel wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's only changing times for those developers that used to get away with only knowing the bare minimum.

Which is most developers. Maybe you work with exceptionally well-informed and talented people but 90% of the web devs I know don't know squat about responsive and MVC frameworks, REST or how to optimize JS. And by "don't know" I mean they have never even heard of the concept, not just that they haven't had the time to learn about it. Sometimes I get funny looks for mentioning even jQuery or modernizr.

[deleted]

Re: Changing times for web developers

#36

Post by bbotond »

TazeTSchnitzel wrote: post #27
bbotond wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which is most developers. Maybe you work with exceptionally well-informed and talented people but 90% of the web devs I know don't know squat about responsive and MVC frameworks, REST or how to optimize JS. And by "don't know" I mean they have never even heard of the concept, not just that they haven't had the time to learn about it. Sometimes I get funny looks for mentioning even jQuery or modernizr.

>Maybe you work with exceptionally well-informed and talented people I don't. I'm not one myself, either. I have no familiarity with MVC frameworks, but I at least know what they are.

Maybe our experience is different because of where we live. I'm Hungarian and most people here speak poor English (due to various reasons - the education system is not exactly stellar and also Hungarian is very, very different from any other European language except Finnish). So few programmers I know read blogs or news sites about programming.

Re: Changing times for web developers

#37

Post by PommeDeTerre »

jasonlotito wrote: post #25
PommeDeTerre wrote: post #12

"Changing times"? What exactly is he talking about? Many of the things he mentioned have been pretty standard, even among the least-knowledgeable web developers, for years now. jQuery has had pretty significant traction for 4 or so years now. Crockford's work is extremely well-know, as well, and has been for some time now. Minifying JavaScript and CSS files isn't new, nor are REST and HTML5. The times did change, but…

> jQuery has had pretty significant traction for 4 or so years now. One could probably assume you already know it. Right? =) > Minifying JavaScript and CSS files isn't new, nor are REST and HTML5. Being new and being widely practiced are two different things. Also, REST is something people still struggle with today, because they assumed they knew it because it's deceptively easy. And HTML5? Really? It takes just 10 s…

I'm going based on the hundreds of web developers I've interviewed over the past few years. These include people with no formal training, through to people with a decade or more of experience.

While I don't specifically ask for experience with jQuery in job postings, there have only been a small handful of those candidates who have never used it. But even they have often just focused on using YUI, MooTools, Dojo, or some other similar framework instead. The "changing times" the article author talks about happened years ago when it comes to these frameworks.

The same goes for HTML5, minifying, REST, and basically everything else he listed. These concepts are common knowledge these days, and basically everyone in the field that I've deal with has been aware of them, and in most cases has actively used them.

I really don't know what to say to you, if you actually are a web developer and you found many of those concepts to be new. A lot of what the article author lists are pretty well-established and widely-used. "Changing times" doesn't really apply at all well after the change has happened.

Re: Changing times for web developers

#38

Post by h2s »

mddw wrote: post #11

I'm always amazed to see how people who give advice (and good ones in this case) are totally unable to follow them on their websites. 296 http requests. 1.85mb transfered. Yslow grade D. So yeah, these are good advices. In fact, the OP should follow 'em if he wants to "survive".

I knew I wasnt missing out on much when an article about advice for the future of web development failed to load correctly on my phone.

Re: Changing times for web developers

#39

Post by blablabla123 »

se85 wrote: post #34

This reads to me like a "6 steps to becoming a better web developer" article because the author completely fails to talk about anything "new".

Being familiar with 5 MVC frameworks is required to be considered as web developer? ;)

Some people also don't like web pages stuffed to the limit with JS code, so I wonder whether everybody agrees that you should take for every task a specialized library. (Responsive framework, modernizr, ...)

Re: Changing times for web developers

#40

Post by TazeTSchnitzel »

bbotond wrote: post #36
TazeTSchnitzel wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Maybe you work with exceptionally well-informed and talented people I don't. I'm not one myself, either. I have no familiarity with MVC frameworks, but I at least know what they are.

Maybe our experience is different because of where we live. I'm Hungarian and most people here speak poor English (due to various reasons - the education system is not exactly stellar and also Hungarian is very, very different from any other European language except Finnish). So few programmers I know read blogs or news sites about programming.

Ah. I'm lucky to live in the UK, which natively speaks English.
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