The Developer's Dystopian Future

Relax.

One of the lovely things about being older is having the confidence to be able to be able to point out that the latest fad is just a warmed-over rehash of something old.

It's important to keep up with the new things, but the fact of the matter is that there is very little in the world of software development that's actually new. Swift? Please. If you know ML (1970's), Smalltalk (1980), and Objective-C (1983), you know 95% of what there is to know about Swift. If you know Smalltalk, you know about 90% of what you need to about Java, and with those two, you know 98% of what you need to about Dart.

Learn the big important things, focus on principles rather than specific implementations, and you'll realize that there's very little new under the sun. At this age, while your brain is still limber, learn as much mathematics and theory as you can. You will probably not use Dart 10 years from now. You can bet you'll use the knowledge you picked up in your combinatorics or algorithms courses.

It's going to be okay. It sounds like your problem is that you want to learn everything- and at 17, that's not really a problem. You can be successful in this industry by choosing any two (ok, almost any two) of the technologies you listed above, and focusing on them for a couple years. If they last longer than that, great.

You certainly don't need to keep up with all of the latest and greatest JS frameworks and understand machine learning to be successful :)

I've got 10 years on you, and while that still isn't much, I can at least give you some advice on how to deal with this.

Nobody can keep up with the entire industry. It seems like you're trying to know everything about everything, and that's simply not possible. What is possible is learning a little bit about everything. If you see a word, technology or concept on HN that you don't know about, spend 30 seconds googling it. Usually, 30 seconds is enough to get a basic idea of what it is about. The more you do this, the more you will be able to relate things to each other, and you'll be able to intuit a lot of context from just a single-line description of something.

Don't try to learn a lot of languages. When you're 17, it's useless to know VB, C++, PHP, C#, Lisp, swift, dart, python AND ruby. Pick one you now know and like, and stick to it for a while. Become a genuinely good coder in one language, and you'll be able to pick up another in no time. Knowing one language really well also teaches you loads of the basic concepts that you can use to understand other technologies. It doesn't matter if it's Angular, RabbitMQ or Big Data, you need a concept of the problem they're trying to solve before you will understand them properly.

Once you have this nailed down, you can learn about whatever you like. Every single thing you learn, whether cursory or in-depth, will help you understand everything else better.

In short, don't try to be a renaissance man, but be a T-shaped person (http://darrennegraeff.com/the-importance-of-t-shaped-individ...)

For the old guys in the room who want a simple way to add AJAX/rich client functionality that stays true to the original web development model:

http://intercoolerjs.org

(NB, basecamp2 was built in this way. So it is possible to build a fairly rich app without the complexity of client side MVC.)

Devops actually makes things a little easier I think. With Ansible, setting up a server on AWS feels a little like maintaining a vimrc file. Get a starter playbook from someone and run that to setup a server on AWS. Then you modify as needed as you go through your days as a developer. The great thing about Ansible playbooks is that it codifies the setup. You have a "recipe" that you can modify and run as needed. For me, this is much better than the days where I would set up a VPS "firing from the hip." If you had me setup 10 different servers, I would have set them up 10 different ways.

I think for development knowledge in general, it might be good to look at the following people...

http://www.kalzumeus.com/ (patio11 here)

http://brennandunn.com/

http://unicornfree.com/

Take a read through. For these guys, it's all about products. In the end, that's all that matters. Maybe try for a change of perspective where you look at your skills in terms of products.

In Amazon, there are probably projects where they lock developers in dark basements to learn arcane crafts so specialized that these engineers forget how to spell their name. These engineers would probably struggle just the same as you if the need for these specialties were to disappear. Faced with the need to "retool" - would they be able to do it? Some might, some might not.

There is (and probably will be for quite some time) still a lot of need for people doing the sort of "LAMP" development that you cut your teeth on. Just because the stack wouldn't run an F-35 doesn't mean it isn't valuable.

So, look at what you know in terms of business models rather than actual skills. Focus more on the product which people need and then fill in the skills.

Do people need AWS and Devops? The client probably isn't going to fuss over this. The client just wants to ship a product. You handle the details.

Most businesses start here and then they change as they get more successful. These projects still need the general guys to come in and get the first iteration shipped. Then later they might need to bring in more specialized engineers to deal with more specific issues. Eventually even the founders may hand over the reigns to "grown up" leadership.

So, you need to figure out where your "market fit" is. You can't be everything to everyone (though at one time it seemed like we could be.) Once you find that, then just carve out some time to continually develop that and keep an eye out on where it's going. Maybe you could even have a side project which you could use as a plan B. You don't have to spend so much time on it that you are having to take away from other important things. Just plan a good hour of focus at certain regular intervals , even if it's just an hour every couple of weeks. You might find that it develops in an interesting direction and you may want to pursue it further.

Further reading...

http://letsworkshop.com/freelance-as-a-service/