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Ask HN: Self-taught webdev with lots of free time. What should I learn?

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Re: Ask HN: Self-taught webdev with lots of free time. What should I learn?

#161

Post by jakub_g »

jameslk wrote: post #135

Web performance This is an underappreciated field that lends to plenty of consulting. As the web becomes more complex, with heavy frontend code, third party services, and demanding amounts of images and videos, it's requiring a deeper understanding about networking and browsers to keep the web performant. Compounding the problem is the growing number of users who use mobile devices to browse the web, which have large…

I'm working as a webperf guy as a staff. I find the work interesting (although sometimes frustrating), but I'm not sure how many companies want to have full-time perf people onsite. As you mentioned, It's mostly consulting type of work now as far as I can tell (so might not be suitable to everyone), but maybe this will evolve or is already evolving (I've been only approached once for webperf onsite position on LinkedIn in last year, by Atlassian, but maybe because my profile is not that well LinkedIn-optimized).

Anyway, if someone's interested, you can start by reading articles from:

https://hpbn.co/

https://web.dev/learn/

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Learn/Performance

https://calendar.perfplanet.com/

https://csswizardry.com/

https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/phame/blog/view/7/

And some of my own content:

https://calendar.perfplanet.com/2018/getting-started-with-we...

https://jakub.gieryluk.net/slides/rivieradev/

Re: Ask HN: Self-taught webdev with lots of free time. What should I learn?

#162

Post by Thaxll »

jjice wrote: post #157
Thaxll wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

postgREST the worst thing ever. Just use the DB to store things, thank you.

I don't see what's so bad. Seems like it would be a convenient way to skip some boiler plate back end code used for CRUD. Probably not optimal for a complex application, but it looks very neat for something quick and small.

If you're learning backend services, don't start by things like postgREST, it's just bad habbit, would be better to start by the basis with API servers / DB ect ...

Re: Ask HN: Self-taught webdev with lots of free time. What should I learn?

#163

Post by thatcodingdude »

ChefboyOG wrote: post #142

TL;DR: There's probably not an obvious, "learn this and you'll increase your job prospects" technology for you at this point. But, you can also decide to learn almost anything, and because of your years of experience, open up a ton of new doors. I'm also a self-taught engineer (well, I've done course work now, but only years after starting in the field). If I'm reading this right, I think you're in a position where t…

Thanks for the detailed answer.

I do intend on staying technical for as long as I can.

I'll have to pick something around servers, UNIX, security and performance since those are actually the (seldom used and surely not deep enough) parts of my job I enjoy the most.

Re: Ask HN: Self-taught webdev with lots of free time. What should I learn?

#165

Post by thatcodingdude »

rexreed wrote: post #93
thatcodingdude wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Job-wise I'd love to find something more technical and less business/project oriented. I find myself not really caring about the end product but I love focusing on how things work. I've often been the only one enjoying debugging since it's more of a brain teaser than a business/product focus. Also the build/deploy part of dev interests me a lot. Also gotta get to a scratch golf handicap, but that's outside scope.

Maybe you should look into diving deeper into DevOps / IT Ops / AI Ops / ML Ops? And perhaps more jobs around Ops / Network / Sys admin stuff? There's a lot of need for good people who like to debug tricky problems.

Seems to be where I'm headed now. A new world of learning opens !

Re: Ask HN: Self-taught webdev with lots of free time. What should I learn?

#166

Post by pabe »

Try to get maximum Google Lighthouse scores. Get into functional programming and useful patterns (e.g. state machines). Try a TDD side project and get a feeling about test coverage. Maybe develop a view about next gen tools / compilers like SvelteJs. There aren't too many people who're able to write a well structured and maintainable, secure high performance web app with a high test coverage.

Career cheat: If well known open source projects merge your code, that's worth a lot!!111

Re: Ask HN: Self-taught webdev with lots of free time. What should I learn?

#167

Post by thatcodingdude »

nicoburns wrote: post #153

Honestly, in terms of employment you don't need to learn anything at all. Your skillset (which is quite similar to mine) is highly in demand. What you'll probably find is that you can specialise in any of the areas you already have skills in simply by advertising yourself differently. However, it's always good to learn more. I have a couple of suggestions: 1. Rust. The Rust book is an excellent introduction to lower-…

By "The Rust Book", do you mean "The Rust Programming Language" ?

Re: Ask HN: Self-taught webdev with lots of free time. What should I learn?

#168

Post by nicoburns »

thatcodingdude wrote: post #167
nicoburns wrote: post #153

Honestly, in terms of employment you don't need to learn anything at all. Your skillset (which is quite similar to mine) is highly in demand. What you'll probably find is that you can specialise in any of the areas you already have skills in simply by advertising yourself differently. However, it's always good to learn more. I have a couple of suggestions: 1. Rust. The Rust book is an excellent introduction to lower-…

By "The Rust Book", do you mean "The Rust Programming Language" ?

Yes indeed. The free online version (which has the same content as the printed version) is available here: https://doc.rust-lang.org/book/

Re: Ask HN: Self-taught webdev with lots of free time. What should I learn?

#169

Post by lizhang »

mcv wrote: post #140
_benj wrote: post #34

I'm a self-taught webdev too and I would strongly recommend learning SQL, not just `SELECT * ...` but really learning it! I've been digging into postgreSQL and in quite a few applications it's possible to greatly reduce the complexity of the backend by receiving exactly the data you need from the DB. It is so much so that in cases you can even "get rid" of the backend completely (yes, no writing controllers and endpo…

Another option is to learn Graph Databases. I notice there's still a big shortage in people with Graph DB experience, and they're not that hard to learn. Try Neo4J, for example.

I have gone down this rabbit hole, and I think neo4j is more suited as an analytics tool than a standalone production database: https://medium.com/@l_i/neo4j-is-a-great-platform-for-analyt...

Re: Ask HN: Self-taught webdev with lots of free time. What should I learn?

#170

Post by conradfr »

Do you often use asynchronous tasks? If not you could use RabbitMQ or Redis (etc) and try to use queues, workers, or pub/sub. Maybe tying that to a websocket.

If you want to expand from PHP you can look up Go or Python. If you want to try something very different and fun but with less prospect for a job try Elixir.

You can also update your skill to the new Vue3.

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