How to Stay Relevant as a Web Developer • Hacker News Board

Re: How to Stay Relevant as a Web Developer

#31

Post by shanelja » Fri, Nov 16, 2012, 3:44 PM UTC

BUGHUNTER wrote: post #27

billyjobob wrote: post #20

The cycles are so much shorter now that what you were doing last year is antiquated, and what you were doing 5 years ago will get you fired. This isn't true in any other field of software development. Has the author not wondered why web development is in such a state of flux? The answer is that the whole concept is a hack - using a document markup system to deliver applications was a poor reinvention of the old thin…

YES!!! Add "print this page" or "print this very long page" that many "webdevelopers" still don´t know how to handle and see how unbelievably br0ken or at least unfinished the whole concept still is. Barners-Lee is a god now and untouchable, but I would nominate him for the "most-unfinished-idea"-oscar, if it existed.

I hate to post this kind of comment, but it's "Tim Berners-Lee".

Re: How to Stay Relevant as a Web Developer

#32

Post by readme » Fri, Nov 16, 2012, 4:59 PM UTC

jiggy2011 wrote: post #6

Maybe I'm just a grumpy old developer, but the idea of learning yet another framework's opinion of exactly what the difference between a Model and Controller class should be, trying to fathom whateverissexy.js and working with yet another "awesome" HTML 5 framework where centering something on a page is still a mystery doesn't fill me with excitement at all . Instead , I would prefer to learn something about "hard" c…

Agreed. That's the difference between lateral and vertical movement. You can go from one framework to the next your whole life, or you can learn the hard stuff.

Companies will hire a guy to do the hard stuff, then hire a couple grunts to write the apps.

Currently, I fall into the grunt category.

Re: How to Stay Relevant as a Web Developer

#33

Post by readme » Fri, Nov 16, 2012, 5:02 PM UTC

aneth4 wrote: post #3

It's a bit idealistic to suggest you must be passionate about web development to continue to be relevant. You can get along just fine if you are in it for the money for a long time to come. You may be miserable with your work, but if you can perform competently you will have a job for the next 10-15 years minimum. That said, these are certainly good practices to be following.

"skills trump passion"

http://www.amazon.com/Good-They-Cant-Ignore-ebook/dp/B0076DD...

Re: How to Stay Relevant as a Web Developer

#34

Post by mcgwiz » Fri, Nov 16, 2012, 6:19 PM UTC

venus wrote: post #24

Torn wrote: post #13

SOAP? Jesus. I think his list is behind the curve; a modern web dev would want to learn: - Javascript, Javascript, Javascript - Frontend: Backbone / Angular/ whatever MV* framework takes your fancy - Backend: restful web services, good APIs. MVCs like Rails/Django if you can't push that stuff to the client. - CSS pre-processors (SASS, Less, etc). Using classes instead of IDs, for modular, re-usable css. OOCSS ideals…

> MVCs like Rails/Django if you can't push that stuff to the client Uh, how exactly would you push your API to the client?

I believe he means that if you cannot use an architecture where you push presentation logic to the client as JavaScrpt (aided by an MVC-like framework like Backbone), serve all HTML/CSS/JS statically, and serve data dynamically through a web service (e.g. node + express or express-resource, RoR or Sinatra, MS Web API or WCF), then it's important to know a modern (MVC-based) server-side web framework dynamically generating HTML.

Re: How to Stay Relevant as a Web Developer

#35

Post by autotravis » Fri, Nov 16, 2012, 6:30 PM UTC

rimantas wrote: post #16

john2x wrote: post #12

This scares me. Right now I'm young, single and almost no responsibilities. I love doing what the article suggests, keep learning new stuff, etc., but I'm not too sure I can keep it up for the next X+ years. And within that time my life could get much more complicated, not to mention the whole industry would keep on changing faster than I can manage, and add to that the unfortunate side-effects of aging. The older I…

> The older I get, the harder I have to work to remain > relevant. No. I will be 40 in a few weeks and I consider myself more relevant than many many web developers half my age, even if web development currently is not my main activity (it was however for the last 14 years). The more you know the easier it gets to grasp new stuff — because it is rarely fundamentally different and you can easily see patterns and where…

exactly. I think it is an common misconception that everybody has trouble learning new things as they grow older. This might be true for some. However, it seems that if you actually try and don't let the misconception trick you into thinking you can't keep learning, then you won't fall victim to it.