There is so much that is wrong with this.
Follow this advise only if you are currently employed and your employment is extremely safe because your employer is deemed essential or because they are financial strong in the current economy. For everybody else very carefully consider why an employer should hire you when the current economy is failing, programmers generally are very expensive and add very little value to the employer's revenue, and why you are a better value than the other 1000 developers that were just laid off. The economy is never going to be the same and the common suspicion moving forward is that software hiring/practice will also change to compensate.
The article opens with having kids and so they cannot work more than 8 hours a day in a specified time slot. This is an absence of ambition and nothing else. Work-life balance takes some figuring out, which isn't avoidance. I have two white-collar careers in unrelated industries and kids. I have time for both jobs, coding on the side, spending time with my kids, helping my wife prepare dinner, and so forth. I am not unique with this regard.
The bit about How to do Javascript is really bad advise. This is largely the story of my career in the corporate world as a JavaScript developer. The employer is mostly a Java shop because Java developers are easy to find since they are effectively mass-produced by universities. The Java developers have absolutely no idea what to do with any aspect of web technologies aside from Spring MVC. JavaScript is required by the business, so the Java developer fake it until they make it. They still have no idea what they are doing then give up and require a framework. Epic fail. Any other industry would call that an ethics violation, negligence, and that path would land you in a law suit or possibly in jail depending upon the product/industry.
> So we went with vanilla JQuery.
That makes me cry. The programming section is followed by a section on testing that almost makes me angry. Many of the use cases provided for writing tests explicitly mention low confidence on the part of the developer. Horrible advice. The things to test are features and use cases. The software does all that it promises or it doesn't and there should be enough automation to prove that. How you go about that depends upon the product.
The security speaks like somebody who has absolutely no idea what security is. When you have absolutely no idea what security is or why the company would spend so much money on it I too would think everything about it is draconian and worthless. So many software developers seem to think they are well versed in security despite having no such experience, education, practice, interest, or credibility and I have never understood why.