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Developer Skills Report

research.hackerrank.com

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Re: Developer Skills Report

#71

Post by meken »

titanomachy wrote: post #38
bob4444 wrote: post #16

Being an Emacs enthusiast myself, it always surprises me how much more popular VIM is. Is this because VIM is taught more in schools? Maybe because VI/VIM is typically installed by default on Linux systems?

The default modal keybindings are fantastic for editing text, once you start learning them it becomes addictive. Once you've learned most of them everything else feels annoyingly clunky. I sometimes use IntelliJ and sublime but if I'm sshing around our network or editing random configs vim is the one that jumps to hand, and it's pretty much my default for everything now. Vim modes in those two IDEs are also pretty go…

The biggest game-changer for me in converting/sticking with emacs was finding out I can edit remote files with my local emacs via TRAMP (https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/TrampMode). No more logging into remote machines and installing a sub-standard subset of my highly customized editor configuration.

And before you say it, yes I know you can edit remote files with vim too. But with emacs/TRAMP it's dead simple.

Re: Developer Skills Report

#72

Post by meken »

innocentoldguy wrote: post #60
bob4444 wrote: post #16

Being an Emacs enthusiast myself, it always surprises me how much more popular VIM is. Is this because VIM is taught more in schools? Maybe because VI/VIM is typically installed by default on Linux systems?

I’ve heard quite a few people complain that Emacs caused them RSIs. That’s why I stopped using it too. Vim is much easier on the hands in that regard.

One word - spacemacs.

It's emacs with vim bindings. You get all the editing goodness of vim with the extensibility of emacs.

Spacemacs has won the editors war.

Re: Developer Skills Report

#73

Post by meken »

Sir_Cmpwn wrote: post #47
bob4444 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Despite this, in my experience, Emacs provides a more feature rich environment, comparable to an IDE, rather than only a text editor.

Not everyone wants an IDE, though. Unix is my IDE, and Vim is just my text editor. I learned emacs first and left it for Vim.

This is fair. For someone that just wants to edit text in an efficient way and doesn't want to tweak/tailor their editor vanilla vim is a good choice.

Re: Developer Skills Report

#74

Post by meken »

meritt wrote: post #2

> And new generations are opting for YouTube to self-teach over books I'm definitely in the older generation because it's completely mind-boggling to me how someone effectively learns to code from watching a video tutorial. You can't flip back to a page, bookmark a link, copy text, zoom-in to see exactly what was done, etc. It feels like you're inherently missing out on so much you gain from a book or a text-filled w…

Videos (and talks for that matter) are good a giving a quick over and showing you what is possible (i.e. getting you into a position where you know what you don't know). Books are good ways to dive deep into things you already know you want to learn.

Re: Developer Skills Report

#75

Post by InclinedPlane »

TheCowboy wrote: post #22

> The biggest gap in knowledge is with JavaScript frameworks > Most often, employers want developers who know AngularJS, Node.js, and React. Am I overthinking this? When I've been looking for jobs, I've found the emphasis on JavaScript frameworks slightly perplexing and frustrating. I would assume that a competent web developer should be capable of quickly learning a framework. Having to know JavaScript, CSS, etc. to…

It's an example of how brain-dead the hiring process is for tech in general. Most of the jobs I've worked in my entire career have involved working with languages, not just frameworks, that I didn't know beforehand. I learned all of them and became good at them on the job. If you have a good grounding in programming fundamentals and you are reasonably productive then it's pretty easy to pick up any language in a short amount of time, especially now.

I think part of this is that there is this common delusion that tech workers in hot fields (like silicon valley startups) have to all be rockstars or have to all have some exceptional level of expertise. And having those people on board is how you crank out software better and faster. The reality is that someone who coincidentally happens to have experience with whatever your current technology stack is may not have the highest level of overall expertise or talent that you truly need.

Re: Developer Skills Report

#76

Post by meken »

meritt wrote: post #2

> And new generations are opting for YouTube to self-teach over books I'm definitely in the older generation because it's completely mind-boggling to me how someone effectively learns to code from watching a video tutorial. You can't flip back to a page, bookmark a link, copy text, zoom-in to see exactly what was done, etc. It feels like you're inherently missing out on so much you gain from a book or a text-filled w…

Videos are dynamic. They are the closest medium currently we can get to pretending we're inside the presenter's head in real time (I'm thinking of khan-academy style videos). To experience how an expert solves a problem and the steps they go though is great and is hard to convey though a book (you would essentially need a flip-book or multi-step diagrams that get very big very fast and it's also hard to convey the temporal aspect of the process that's being explained).

Re: Developer Skills Report

#77

Post by mythrwy »

applecrazy wrote: post #56
flukus wrote: post #27

The site is actually readable if you turn off that awful css. Who thought removing white space from the titles and adding an obnoxious faux cursor were a good idea? Most/all of the charts gain absolutely nothing from the interactive features either, a grouped histogram style chart could show the same information in a static image. It would be better actually, you could compare the groups side by side instead of relyi…

I agree. On my relatively high speed internet connection on Chrome 63 (latest) running on a recent laptop, it took 55 seconds, 426 requests, and 2.6MB to load the first graph on the page. Sure, a lot of the loaded assets are in my cache for subsequent visits, but that initial load time is just...wow.

The content of those 426 requests weren't created for free. Part of the "high demand" developer skills I suppose. Adding gunk to the point you can't get the content. I'd guess sooner rather than later the pendulum is going to swing back to simplicity. Then having good sense about how to effectively portray something without tormenting everyone and wasting resources will be in high demand. As it always should have been.

Re: Developer Skills Report

#78

Post by dragonwriter »

baron816 wrote: post #12
meritt wrote: post #2

> And new generations are opting for YouTube to self-teach over books I'm definitely in the older generation because it's completely mind-boggling to me how someone effectively learns to code from watching a video tutorial. You can't flip back to a page, bookmark a link, copy text, zoom-in to see exactly what was done, etc. It feels like you're inherently missing out on so much you gain from a book or a text-filled w…

Don’t knock it until you try it. I’ve learned a great ton from YouTube videos or just watching the videos in sequence on Frontend Masters. Watching them at an increased speed let’s me cover a lot of ground very quickly. I also like writing down headers of important topics, and then going back and doing research on those topics and essentially trying to write a brief book in my own words on everything. Helps me get a…

> Don’t knock it until you try it.

I've tried it, and found video quite good for conveying emotional content, general high-level overviews, and general feeling of comfort with the shape of a topic, but quite bad at detailed technical information.

That's not saying that they aren't useful: I find videos that provide overview of material provided in detail in a textual medium to be quite useful. But if I had to do one or the other alone for learning technical material, it would be textual media over video 100% of the time.

Re: Developer Skills Report

#79

Post by expertentipp »

booleandilemma wrote: post #39
dvt wrote: post #24

> What’s the biggest challenge when hiring talent? "Hard to assess skills before onsite" -- That's funny, I've never had a hiring manager or interviewer look at my literal hundreds of thousands of lines of code on GitHub or several of the OSS projects I've contributed to. Not to mention the actual book I co-wrote.

Recruiter: “How many hours a day would you say you use Meteor?”

Doesn't matter because you probably have experience in the wrong version of it anyway.

Re: Developer Skills Report

#80

Post by AFNobody »

rattray wrote: post #32
TheCowboy wrote: post #22

> The biggest gap in knowledge is with JavaScript frameworks > Most often, employers want developers who know AngularJS, Node.js, and React. Am I overthinking this? When I've been looking for jobs, I've found the emphasis on JavaScript frameworks slightly perplexing and frustrating. I would assume that a competent web developer should be capable of quickly learning a framework. Having to know JavaScript, CSS, etc. to…

Right, they don't want to have to pay you to do the learning. It's usually not "how to get a simple task done with React" – many engineers can get there very quickly – but rather having an understanding of best-practices in terms of architecting your application. Angular, well, can take a while to learn how to use properly.

> It's usually not "how to get a simple task done with React" – many engineers can get there very quickly – but rather having an understanding of best-practices in terms of architecting your application.

Find me a Web Developer than can perform a sysadmin role on production sites, building out a CRM integration on some bizarre platform with its own programming language, work on improving an ERP, and the integration between them. Oh, and you also need to know React and some standard MVC stack like RoR.

No?

---

Now, you might think that is a joke or absurd. It is not. It is also as relevant an expectation as asking if they know React.

Your point of view screams silo'd front end developer.

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