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

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

#161

Post by davidjnelson »

lstamour wrote: post #93
crazygringo wrote: post #86

If you're looking to maximize your choice of companies to work at, one piece of advice could be to focus on front-end instead of back-end. I'm equally proficient at front-end and back-end, but the last time I did a whole bunch of interviews, I advertised myself as a front-end programmer (since there aren't too many full-stack positions around). Why? As a back-end developer, you're limited to picking companies that ma…

Ah but then you get http://www.100percentjs.com/just-like-grunt-gulp-browserify-... (and HN discussion) ... of course, despite this, I'm in your camp. Even as I'm doing mobile and now learning modern/ISO C++ for cross-platform development, the strengths that originally got me hired were in web programming and you can always pick up enough to work with views in one of the big technologies, be it Wordpress/Drupal (sigh…

Angular. Seriously.

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

#162

Post by davidjnelson »

Silhouette wrote: post #149
DanHulton wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

Angular can easily work as a facade to the underlying es6 features coming soon.

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

#163

Post by shawndumas »

jared314 wrote: post #145
shawndumas wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

both and. the talent acquisition folk were very interested in how the engineers went about finding people. they shared all of what we were doing with the other talent acquisition people at their all hands meetings.

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

#164

Post by davidjnelson »

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…

It's a real shame you guys chose ember over angular. Why did you do that?

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

#165

Post by shawndumas »

davidjnelson wrote: post #164
shawndumas wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It's a real shame you guys chose ember over angular. Why did you do that?

lol, tons of reasons... a few off the top of my head; routes are central to EmberJS and are key to SPAs. AngularJS uses primitives as models which means that at the kind of scale we are hitting in our apps performance suffers (dirty checking 10k rows is killer) (also, computed props are easy, and we're into UAP). EmberJS' caching rocks.

But the big one is -- Google. When are they gonna pull the plug on AngulerJS, how broad is the contribution base outside of Google, and not using YUI was already a battle...

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

#167

Post by Silhouette »

davidjnelson wrote: post #162
Silhouette wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

Angular can easily work as a facade to the underlying es6 features coming soon.

But why would you want it to? It's likely to wind up being a leaky abstraction at best, assuming it survives that long, which is far from certain given Google's track record. If you want to be bleeding edge with web components, I would have thought experimenting with Polymer would be more interesting and give an easier transition to native features as they become available. If you want a more production-ready component-style framework today, why not use React instead of Angular?

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

#168

Post by mbesto »

greendata wrote: post #156
mbesto wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You mean ABAP ;) Actually SAP is at a very interesting crossroad right now. You don't have to know ABAP anymore. If you can leverage SAP Gateway and check out OpenUI5 - http://sap.github.io/openui5/ you can make a name for yourself. There is heavy demand for this area right now and not enough supply. EDIT- If anyone is interested in this area, let me know!

I'm a current python/ruby/javascript contractor interested in getting into SAS/ABAP consulting and development. Do you have any recommendations where to start?

I sent this response to a few people who emailed me already:

Check out: http://scn.sap.com/community/netweaver-gateway http://scn.sap.com/docs/DOC-27405 Especially check out SAP Fiori - http://scn.sap.com/docs/DOC-41598 - this is SAP's unified workflow app.

Basically SAP has put a lot of effort into taking it's old archaic back-end and making it "open", and Gateway enables backend systems like ERP/CRM/etc. to be able to talk to any RESTful front-ends (mobile, js, etc).

Go ahead and play with their oData demo system: http://scn.sap.com/docs/DOC-31221

Let me know if you have any other questions!

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

#169

Post by erichocean »

ilaksh wrote: post #59
erichocean wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm rewriting our Node.js based server in a combination of C and LuaJIT as we speak. The performance difference is absolutely astounding, in part because our Node.js app relies heavily on compiled modules, and the cost to cross from JavaScript to C++ and back is obscene. The straight C implementation looks like it'll be over 1000 times faster for our use case, which involves tons of buffer manipulation and usage of c…

Have you seen Nimrod? http://nimrod-lang.org/manual.html#foreign-function-interfac... https://github.com/Araq/Nimrod/wiki/Nimrod-for-C-programmers http://nimrod-lang.org/

I hadn't, looks interesting!

We're actually building on top of Snabb Switch[0], which is giving us another 10x improvement on beefier hardware (2x$2600 CPUs, vs the single socket, $800 CPU we're using now).

Our current engineering goal is 1 million full transactional, ACID-compliant writes per second, and 10 million reads per second, on a single dual-socket E5-2697 v2 box. That's a line rate (for our application) of just under 24Gb/second, which we're handling with a single 40Gb Ethernet adaptor.

Obviously, we did not think Node.js would get even close to this, but we did think it would at least work for a month or two for 10,000-50,000 users. Sadly, it's only got us through development and now that we've submitted the app to Apple, the server is being rewritten from the ground up for adequate performance.

If Node.js's performance had been closer, I probably would have spent time optimizing the Node.js server, but it's so far off right now that it's just not worth the effort. The Snabb Switch port is expected to take less than 10 days total (we're already 5 days into it).

For better or worse, the way we've been designing even high performance servers like nginx is just out-of-date. Intel made a huge push to replace custom, ASIC-based network processors with E5 Xeons, and the software development in the larger community just hasn't caught up yet.

Snabb Switch, for example, has a wire-to-wire latency, in LuaJIT, of just 26 nanoseconds. For reference, that's about how long it takes a photon of light to travel 25 feet. When messaging speeds are that fast, the Linux kernel is an enormous source of inefficiency, and even TCP is less than ideal (we use a UDP-based protocol with full public-key encryption per packet).

[0] https://github.com/SnabbCo/snabbswitch

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

#170

Post by mlh »

ForHackernews wrote: post #114
72deluxe wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is odd that the Chromebooks are best-sellers. I have never ever seen one "in the flesh" here in the UK. Perhaps I am not visiting coffee shops enough? Anyone else seen one?

I'm in the US, and I've never seen one. I suspect Chromebooks will go the way of netbooks before them.

I live in a suburb of Los Angeles where every kid in the school district has been issued a chromebook. this is the kind of market share Google will capture. For better or worse.
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