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If you had to start over, what technologies would you learn in 2014?

hanselman.com

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Re: If you had to start over, what technologies would you learn in 2014?

#141

Post by phreanix »

edj wrote: post #92
gonehome wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suppose in your case you're choosing between two bad options. The iOS app is an example of how much better a native app can be from the web app - and the new paper app even more so. I remember the android one being terrible when I had android phones a couple years ago - but I thought that was because it was basically a wrapper around a web app.

The iOS app is an example of how much better a native app can be from the web app Huh? My perception of the Facebook iOS (iPad) app is that it is badly, badly broken. It opens links within the app and there is no way to override this behavior. This means I can't browse Facebook-sourced sites alongside everything else I'm browsing or bookmark those sites in Pinboard. I can't even copy & paste the URL from the Facebook…

Wait, isn't there an option to open in safari?

Re: If you had to start over, what technologies would you learn in 2014?

#143

Post by nostrademons »

sliverstorm wrote: post #118
stiff wrote: post #105

This idea that a software engineer picks a language as his "favourite" and becomes a "Ruby developer" or a "JavaScript developer" ever since is completely misguided, and I'm sad to see it cherished further in this article. Languages are tools, and tools should be picked depending on the project: its application domain, performance requirements, availability of libraries for important subproblems that have been identi…

Becoming a "JavaScript developer" surely pigeonholes you, and that is not good, but early in your learning process it can be good to pick a bread-and-butter language to master first. That way, you aren't spread thin as you learn everything for the first time, and when you learn new languages you can relate them back to your first language, of which you have a complete grasp. Naturally in the long run you want to be t…

The other nice thing about picking a "bread-and-butter" language is that it qualifies you for opportunities where you can leverage it to learn other skills. It's so much easier to learn, say, machine-learning if you enter a company where there are machine-learning experts that you can observe at work and ask questions of, rather than just trying to read all the online course material. That requires having something to bring to the table, and if you're really good at frontend stuff you can get hired at places that do that and work on projects where people are doing really interesting backend stuff.

Re: If you had to start over, what technologies would you learn in 2014?

#144

Post by Fasebook »

skrebbel wrote: post #6

Folks, the big point of this article is not that Hanselman likes C#, it's that his list of options does not include Objective-C or Java. It's that he thinks that the web will win (over app stores). I strongly believe that he's right there. At some point, app stores had "discoverability" as an advantage over the web. This has been one of the strongholds of native app proponents. These days however, with the enormous a…

>and hide the difference between apps and web apps, and your mom won't care anymore

Completely wrong, imho. There's no benefit to obscuring information about what the user is doing. This also implies a universal cloud storage where authors of software have more access to user's personal information than the user.

You're basically yearning for what Google's Chrome crap is trying to do, so you're not going to do it better.

> Given that the world's #1 mobile OS is made by the worlds #1 web company, this change is not difficult to predict.

I think I see where you're coming from here. If you just want to suckle at the tit at what ever company is #1, then sure, learning their stack and developing whatever for it is a sure way to make steady income. Shit, how about a steady job while you're at it. Then it really doesn't matter what widgets you're pumping out. Wait, is this an entrepreneurship forum? Anyway, trying to play Google's game or Apple's game is just a good way to be their bitch. I'm sure you're aware of why "discoverablity" has been removed from appstores. This is a culture war, at some fronts.

If you want to build a digital prison for your mom, go right ahead, but don't expect your kids to embrace this "cloud" stuff in any way that you're dreaming of. You're just building outdated virtual landfill techgarbage the moment you touch any of these paradigms you're talking about.

Re: If you had to start over, what technologies would you learn in 2014?

#145

Post by jared314 »

shawndumas wrote: post #135
macspoofing wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>It's just JavaScript, JavaScript, JavaScript. No it's not. Because JavaScript the language is so bare-bones, you need to supplement language deficiencies with frameworks and libraries. So you go and pick from a menu of Backbone/Marionette, Angular, ExtJS, Ember, Kendo, jQuery or etc. - some of them work together, some of them don't. Most of those get you part of the way there, you may still need to pull in things li…

I am stuck in a hiring war-room for the last 2 weeks (two to go). [1] We are using jQuery/EmberJS/Bootstrap/Grunt. Everyone of the FEs agreed that experience in any JS MVC was acceptable. [2] So while I agree that it's not JS, JS, JS but it's not quite as bad as what you're saying. -------- [1]: We were having a problem getting front-end people so they had managers put 15 front-end engineers on the task full time for…

> We were having a problem getting front-end people so they had managers put 15 front-end engineers on the task full time for a month

I have never heard of a hiring war-room or lockdown of that type. Are you redesigning/improving the current process, or just interviewing people until you meet the quota?

Re: If you had to start over, what technologies would you learn in 2014?

#146

Post by alkonaut »

lmm wrote: post #139
alkonaut wrote: post #10

I'd learn F# + C + Rust + TypeScript/ES6. Anything that lets me avoid learning C++ or JS.

I think you're coming from a specialized area if C++ even seems like an option. And C + Rust seems like lot of overlap.

Option for what?

Yes C and Rust (and C++) overlap a lot. C is inevitable for a lot of embedded and low level stuff, but for large scale systems dev I hope to see Rust replace C++.

Re: If you had to start over, what technologies would you learn in 2014?

#147

Post by _random_ »

drdiablo wrote: post #16

My opinion on "the web will persist and the web will win" is that it's not a won battle. Native apps have always been smoother, giving users a better experience overall. On the contrary, mobile web apps have been bad, and haven't much evolved since we started having mobile devices (laptops don't count :p). I'm pretty sure that the future resides in mobile devices, and they can't rub the web, we'll have to use the alt…

I think there are too many smart and capable developers in the world to settle on old poorly-upgradable languages for everything. So hopefully there will always be a choice.

Re: If you had to start over, what technologies would you learn in 2014?

#148

Post by Silhouette »

RussianCow wrote: post #140
Silhouette wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because JavaScript the language is so bare-bones, you need to supplement language deficiencies with frameworks and libraries. Since when? It's perfectly possible to build web sites/apps, even large scale ones, using no framework at all. Pick a handy utility library, whether it's jQuery or Underscore/Lodash or whatever, and get coding. I don't know where this idea that you somehow have to build web apps using some hum…

If the point is to easily be able to find work (which was the parent's emphasis), then yes, you need to learn the popular frameworks. No, it's not required for building your own web app, but companies use them, so they'll expect you to be familiar with them.

Where are you based? It seems like in most places it's an employee's market right now (assuming you work for an employer). Given the diversity of front-end frameworks and how new most of the trendy ones are, I find it extremely hard to believe that anyone who's any good at front-end development and has a decent track record to prove it will be short of work any time soon, even if they don't have a full complement of buzzwords on the resume. And of course it's certainly not necessary if you're doing it for your own business or if you're consulting/freelancing and have your pick of tools.

Re: If you had to start over, what technologies would you learn in 2014?

#149

Post by Silhouette »

DanHulton wrote: post #120
macspoofing wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>It's just JavaScript, JavaScript, JavaScript. No it's not. Because JavaScript the language is so bare-bones, you need to supplement language deficiencies with frameworks and libraries. So you go and pick from a menu of Backbone/Marionette, Angular, ExtJS, Ember, Kendo, jQuery or etc. - some of them work together, some of them don't. Most of those get you part of the way there, you may still need to pull in things li…

It's javascript, angular, and jQuery. Seriously, jQuery > all the other "low-level" libraries out there combined, and Angular > all the other frameworks out there combined, several times over . If you want to interview practically anywhere, learn those three and you're solid.

Angular > all the other frameworks out there combined, several times over.

Sure. But according to my in tray, last week it was Backbone, next week React is taking over the world, and by March we'll have standardised web components anyway.

It may be true that today Angular is much more popular than all the other frameworks, but if so, it will probably be a short-lived peak and IMHO says more about developers putting too much faith in frameworks generally than anything else.

Re: If you had to start over, what technologies would you learn in 2014?

#150

Post by [deleted] »

millstone wrote: post #127
bad_user wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "In the browser is like 500 if we were to do things on javascript." That's more like 1.5x: http://asmjs.org/ http://www.unrealengine.com/html5/ https://hacks.mozilla.org/2013/12/gap-between-asm-js-and-nat... > "Android is not web for a reason. It sucks for lots of things. It is not that Google has not tried, as it is in their best interest to do so." Google hasn't tried deep integration of web apps with Android. Th…

You linked to the HTML5 Unreal Engine demo to demonstrate that JavaScript is competitive with C. But Unreal Engine is not written in JavaScript. It is written in C++. Do you mean to say that this is the future of the web: software written using traditionally native languages, delivered in a compiled blob that the user can't inspect, but that has good performance? This sounds more like native software encroaching on t…

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