I'm surprised there was no mention of CoffeeScript.
Why? For CoffeeScript you already need to know and understand how JavaScript work.
And for a experienced JS programmer, it will be very easy to code in CoffeeScript.
Why It’s a Good Idea to Be a JavaScript Developer, and What it Takes to Be One
31–40 of 108 posts
Re: Why It’s a Good Idea to Be a JavaScript Developer, and What it Takes to Be One
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
I do pretty much what the article describes and you echo the sentiment I get from dev friends who hate working with CSS and the DOM! I enjoy it though. There's a lot of art to it. I have absorbed a decade's worth of trivia that lets me usually do the right thing first time or find the solution quickly. And I generally get to be the interface to other teams (like designers, content people) which I like too.
Yep, the way I see it is that both backend and frontend development have their bad parts: you either faff around with broken config files, or faff around with broken stylesheets. (Obviously both have their good sides too). It comes down to which you find easiest to tolerate. E.g., I don't enjoy fixing CSS quirks in IE6, but I find it a lot less painful than trying to figure out why my fastcgi daemon keeps crashing.
The common denominator of all that is wrong with development today is the internet. Work on a library, thick client, compiler, or anything like that and you are fine, but work too close to any of the tiers in some kind of internet/web based application and your day is filled with misery.
Hopefully this internet thing will just fade away soon and we can all go back to real development.
Re: Why It’s a Good Idea to Be a JavaScript Developer, and What it Takes to Be One
#33I think you're confusing Javascript Developer and Front End Web Developer. The two are mutually exclusive.
Solo founders routinely wear both of those hats and then some.
Re: Why It’s a Good Idea to Be a JavaScript Developer, and What it Takes to Be One
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
I do pretty much what the article describes and you echo the sentiment I get from dev friends who hate working with CSS and the DOM! I enjoy it though. There's a lot of art to it. I have absorbed a decade's worth of trivia that lets me usually do the right thing first time or find the solution quickly. And I generally get to be the interface to other teams (like designers, content people) which I like too.
Yep, the way I see it is that both backend and frontend development have their bad parts: you either faff around with broken config files, or faff around with broken stylesheets. (Obviously both have their good sides too). It comes down to which you find easiest to tolerate. E.g., I don't enjoy fixing CSS quirks in IE6, but I find it a lot less painful than trying to figure out why my fastcgi daemon keeps crashing.
Thankfully many/most of us don't have to worry about IE6-7, and IE8 is falling off (mostly)... the app I currently work on is only IE9+ and modern browsers. I feel that IE9 is really the only legacy browser with significant market share.. once that's passed, it will be better for all involved.
I've been dealing with browser quirks since the mid 90's... there's never been a better time to be a web developer. That said the browser tech alone has exploded with CORS, Web Sockets and WebRTC ... that's not counting the ground gained with node.js, mongodb and others...
The landscape is rapidly changing, so who knows what the near, and the next couple of years will bring to the table. Golang, docker.io and coreos are other things to keep an eye on.
Re: Why It’s a Good Idea to Be a JavaScript Developer, and What it Takes to Be One
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you were a full stack JavaScript wizard AND you had solid design skills, you would be a unicorn with hooves made of diamond and a jet engine strapped on its ass.
Alas, my design skills stretch no further than the ability to vet designs created by others and giving decent suggestions. I think this makes me more of a pony with an ice cream cone duct taped to its forehead.
Haha!
In seriousness, some tips that I find help:
* Learn & use Bootstrap. A manager actually told me to use Bootstrap instead of a custom webapp design created by his in-house designer once. The defaults are fine for a surprisingly wide range of projects.
* Learn some design basics, like the rule of thirds, typography and picking palettes from colour wheels.
* Don't be afraid to copy other people's designs. Conversely, if you're copying whatever is in fashion right now (I'm looking at you, long, scrolling pages split into sections of type/images...), then you might be better off just using Bootstrap.
Finally...
* Hire a designer.
Re: Why It’s a Good Idea to Be a JavaScript Developer, and What it Takes to Be One
#36I'm surprised there was no mention of CoffeeScript.
Why? For CoffeeScript you already need to know and understand how JavaScript work. And for a experienced JS programmer, it will be very easy to code in CoffeeScript.
Yeah this point needs to be stressed. CS is just javascript. You're not suppose to use CS unless you know JS well. Enough said.
Re: Why It’s a Good Idea to Be a JavaScript Developer, and What it Takes to Be One
#37One thing I have learned in my years of experience... Stay away from any job posting that asks for ninjas, rock stars or bad asses.
I dont understand those job ads. What kind of person honestly describes themselves as such? Maybe I am just too jaded, but god damn, note to self: kill myself if I ever use one of those titles.
Re: Why It’s a Good Idea to Be a JavaScript Developer, and What it Takes to Be One
#38[deleted]
Re: Why It’s a Good Idea to Be a JavaScript Developer, and What it Takes to Be One
#39Is it just me, or does the article and about 90% of the comments seem like extreme navel gazing? You could paraphrase most of them simply as "Look at me, I'm a JS badass/ninja/guru/rockstar and in very high demand -- but I'm not full of myself, honest!".
Re: Why It’s a Good Idea to Be a JavaScript Developer, and What it Takes to Be One
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
I applied for a backend and told them I did node.js and does javascript dev (which they were looking for). They tested me on front end shit. And thinks that javascript is only front end. While there are many down falls with node.js it still pay the bill, interest tech, and I wish people would realized that just cause you program js you doesn't imply that you want to do front end. I hate front end. It's just not for m…
Unless you are handling massive amounts of concurrent connections, are there not better choices than Node for the server side? Its still a fairly new technology.
Node does offer a lot of advantages beyond just many concurrent connections... A single language paradigm for client and server is big... the exact same language/structure/models for client and server communications and validation is pretty big. Many client-side tools utilize node.js these days as well.
In general node.js combined with npm bring a lot less friction to development than other languages. Using node to create shim services for a front end communicating through to different backands is brain dead simple as well. In fact there's been a few times that creating a service in node.js to communicate with an ill-defined backend was so much easier in node compared to the static language the main application was working in it was a no brainer.
Utility scripts in JS can also be pretty useful.. any kind of stream manipulations work well in node.js too.
This doesn't even mention that JSON (current data transmission structure du jour) is native to the environment. And storage systems like MongoDB (couch, rethinkdb and others) is really transparent to node.
I couldn't even begin to all list the advantages, but here are a few.. the event loop system, libuv library bindings internal to node.js, language singularity, the npm system and over 40k modules...