During the late nineties I was making various interactive/dynamic websites using the then standard technologies: HTML, PHP, Perl, Mysql, and a tiny bit of CSS. This was the time when Javascript was really only used for form field validation and to spawn popups (Ajax was not yet around), when all layout was done using borderless table/tr/td HTML elements, when there were no mobile devices and all you had to care about was one or two screen resolutions and basically two browsers: Netscape and MSIE. Since then I have been pursuing my IT career in a different area. But sometimes I still find myself wanting to setup a website every now and then. But in the little free time I have available, I stumble upon all kinds of web technologies and frameworks: JQuery, Node.js, Ruby on rails, AngularJS, Backbone.JS, Django, Bootstrap, to name a few. Ofcourse all have their purpose, weaknesses and strengths. But after work and family, there isn't much time left for exploring and trying new things. Maybe other people have already made this journey and can share their experiences? What would be the best way for a nineties web developer to update his knowledge and skills?
Ask HN: How does a 1990s web developer get back on track?
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Re: Ask HN: How does a 1990s web developer get back on track?
#2It's pretty easy to break it down to the common parts but there definitely is quite a bit to learn.
NodeJS or Python or Ruby
These are your fairly standard backend choices. They all have minimalist and full featured frameworks for building applications including but not limited to Express, Koa, Ruby On Rails, Sinatra, Django, Flask. Go is also fairly easy to get going quickly in. There is not really a wrong choice here for a personal project.
In the case that you want a single page application that works with the backend you made with the previous choices:
Backbone or Angular or React+Redux(any flux implementation will do)
These are for consuming your backend and any of them will do. Learning Angular is its own thing despite it being javascript. React+Redux seems a little odd by embedding html in your javascript but once you get the hang of it it's pretty neat. Don't know much about Backbone but I've heard its fairly easy to use.
Bootstrap is pretty easy to learn and use to make your website responsive with minimal effort.
Heroku is by far the easiest platform for deployment and horizontal scaling however it can get pricey quickly. AWS has a similar solution with Elastic Beanstalk but I've got no experience to share with that. If you want all the control (but more work) you can go with Digital Ocean for a 5$ VPS. Unlike Heroku you will have do all admin work like installing necessary packages, databases, and configuring a web-server but you can control every little bit of your application without having to spend more than $5 a month.
Re: Ask HN: How does a 1990s web developer get back on track?
#3You could start slowly teaching yourself more about new technologies, but try and become even more an expert on the stuff you already know.
Perl and MySQL are strong choices and there must be a lot of big companies out there who still use them because it works for them. Startups always want the cutting-edge technology (NoSQL), but sometimes a good old RDBMS like MySQL is the way to go.
Inspired by: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10084449
Re: Ask HN: How does a 1990s web developer get back on track?
#4Instead of trying to do it all at once you might want to take it in chunks.
I would start on the front end and
I would start with looking into Bootstrap and jquery. And look at using PHP to deliver the webservice data to jquery. http://tutorialzine.com/2015/01/shoutbox-php-jquery/
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I would also google some MVC PHP tutorals to get some idea of how MVC works since alot of modern frameworks are modeled after it.
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next pick a javascript framework to make a SPA here's some tutorials(middle of the page) on using angularjs with php: http://www.angularcode.com/
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now your ready to swap out php for another server technology. nodejs, RoR, whatever.
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Re: Ask HN: How does a 1990s web developer get back on track?
#5-I think it is better to advance in the technologies that you know like HTML/CSS and PHP. Advance what I mean is learning about things like
- First of all don't worry about the new technologies coming out every day. Rather than that give more focus to architecture. learn more about Design patterns, its benefits, its implementation, Code structuring, Optimization, Scalability etc.
- If you don't know MVC architecture (the most popular architecture) then learn a PHP framework like Laravel or Yii. The framework also teaches you common methodologies like Object-oriented programming, Object-relational mapping, Templating, etc.
- Once you learned any framework, and, of course, like everyone you try to build an application. Go for it. But at this type when you deal with HTML try to improve it slowly. Like learning more about tags and setting up the layout. Updating to HTML5 won't be that difficult. It's all matter in practice and you can practice it while building the application. But don't think about CSS until you finish the app.
- After Building the app then think about CSS. now you spend time learning CSS. Because most of the people think it's a matter of learning the properties and use it. To some extent it's true, but when you deal with real scenarios it's not. A simple CSS issue can bring down the business for an hour. It's very critical. So give a bit time in learning CSS and CSS3. When you learning, understand more about Organizing, Layouts & Web Typography. The terms sound pretty big. But it's very easy to make it as a practice.
- Once you understand CSS, add that knowledge to the app you are building. But before that, I suggest you make a pencil and paper sketch of the page and components. You can search for grid paper (with browser template) download and print it. And use that for drawing, because it helps to calculate the pixel values. and it helps you writing CSS. The sketch acts as a blueprint for the CSS. and Its fun doing. you feel like an engineer.. :)
- After all, if you are still thirsty then learn jquery. after that, Javascript design patterns and then after any frameworks like ReactJS or AngularJs or etc.
- Learning a PHP frameworks help you a lot in learning HTML, CSS, and basic javascript uisng jquery. so its worth trying.
* This is my modified based on my real experience. Long ago I started from system maintenance to a Geographical information system engineer to a backend developer to a frontend developer and now to a designer. and I also travel through the same path you travelled PHP, HTML and CSS. and little bit python. This is just a vague suggestion. feel free to ask more. All the best
Peace
Re: Ask HN: How does a 1990s web developer get back on track?
#6My take is that a greater percentage of websites can be written in HTML and CSS than currently are: both in the sense of websites that could be entirely written in HTML and CSS and as portions of websites that can be written in HTML and CSS instead of with something else.
Many of current batch of tools were developed to meet the needs of engineering teams at scale: e.g. Angular @ Google and React @ Facebook. Their heritage is not "hobbyist programmer" friendly. They are great if the hobby is reading about technology. But many many of those opinions embedded in Django and Rails only become natural once a person is deeply familiar with the culture of their communities.
My advice, do the simplest thing that will work and make something. Pick tools that require a lower level of commitment to an overall architecture as the need arises. Stay out of silos and rabbit holes.
Good luck.
Re: Ask HN: How does a 1990s web developer get back on track?
#7After reading the other suggestions, I'm going to suggest static site generators that you can deploy to AWS s3 or Github pages. The most popular of these is Jekyll (https://github.com/jekyll/jekyll) which is written in Ruby, but here is a list of a bunch of others written in many different languages:
Re: Ask HN: How does a 1990s web developer get back on track?
#8It looks like you have a good background on things. As a polyglot with experience in plenty of languages, I'd minimize the number of syntaxes to pick up. I would focus on leveraging your javascript background as a starting point.
Let me tell you why.
Not much has changed since the 90's in one area: there are as many opinions and interpretations running around as facts. There's no shortage of time being spent re-inventing the wheel over and over in frameworks that really don't look much different. The end result is most languages have pretty decent frameworks to work with.
A better question is what would be a best path forward for you to dip your feet in and move forward?
The web and mobile landscape is a lot nicer now with the tools that aim to help you get things done quicker, as long as you don't go off their beaten path.
Which two swiss army knife tools could you use to roll out into one thing?
The first big shift is to think mobile first, including mobile web based apps that also work on desktop.
I've jumped into Javascript more so in the past year as node.js has continued to mature. I use my strategically limited time to build value and not spend my time learning like I had to in my 20's.
The frameworks I'm playing with at the moment that provided a good coverage for web applications as well as doing mobile web app dev, as well as mobile app development.
Sails.js (forked to trails.js now) will be familiar to you. This will cover writing web apps and not having to build your own entire stack. Has worked wonderfully for the few projects I've used it for.
To cover mobile development, I recommend looking at ionic framework to start out with. It can connect just fine to a backend like parse.com.
There are no shortage of business and information driven apps (that pay well) that this technology can create with one code base for all end points. There is a great case to build native apps once something like this solves a problem.
If you want to get into mobile development from a higher level to explore, I really recommend a tool like appery.io. It was dicey before in places but now has ionic built in, it's a fantastic prototyping tool for JS apps.
Beyond this, I've always had a crush on Python and want to spend more time with it, but for now Javascript keeps me moving along.
Feel free to reach out if you wanna chat, you sound like you have a lot of experience already.
Re: Ask HN: How does a 1990s web developer get back on track?
#9From those times (nineties) only html tags and are not changed, and javascript alert. Everything else you can consider to be absolutely new, and just vaguely familiar to what it was before. So, get started with some technology tutorial (any you like or plan to get job with), don't waste any more time waiting!
Re: Ask HN: How does a 1990s web developer get back on track?
#10Being that you are already familiar with HTML/CSS and PHP, I suggest getting updated with those first. Learn responsive design or Bootstrap to get started on the front-end (HTML). Do some reading on the latest CSS best practices and go through a couple of JavaScript and jQuery tutorials. For PHP, I suggest reading through http://www.phptherightway.com/ because a lot has changed with PHP over the last few years.
All of this will give you what you need to built out a robust site. After you are updated and comfortable with these, you may then decide to move onto learning other things such as React, Node, etc.