Any developers/programmers in here?

[SCJR]

Dev since the 90's. Learned C in high school. Got a Computer Engineering degree (and a Physics degree because I wasn't sure what I wanted to do). Worked for a long time at a University writing random stuff to support research, which got me a lot of experience with a wide array of languages/tools/etc. These days my title is "Senior Systems Architect" at a relatively small startup and my job involves less coding and more writing documentation, trying to teach developers how to build reliable services (most of the last decade of my career has been vaguely "SRE" type work whether I had that title or not), reviewing code, debugging the stuff that the junior devs can't figure out, and helping the company navigate security/compliance things like SOC 2.

Most of my work coding (including the current job) has been in Python and Go (plus a few years of hardcore Perl back in the 90s and smatterings of pretty much every other language that I needed for research tasks). On my own time, I'm a big functional programming nerd and I particularly love Erlang (RIP Joe Armstrong--great guy to have a beer with) and have been using that for projects for more than a decade now. I've been learning Rust as well. I don't like it the same way I like Erlang, but I'm excited about how it seems to be impacting the industry (if you're thinking about learning C++: don't. Learn Rust instead. Even if you have to go back to C++, learning Rust will teach you to the way you *should* be writing C++ and you'll be a better C++ programmer).

Since I'm an admitted Erlang fan, I'm probably biased when I suggest sticking with Elixir (which essentially runs on top of Erlang). I'm not crazy about Elixir syntax (I was never a Ruby fan) but the foundations it's built on are great and the tooling and community around Elixir are top notch right now. Phoenix, LiveView, and Nerves are all amazing. It's not that widely used and you won't see a million job listings for Elixir programmers, but there are also a lot fewer Elixir programmers out there so you have a better shot at the jobs that do exist and any company that's working in Elixir is probably a really interesting place with a better than average engineering culture. If you learn the Erlang/OTP fundamentals that you'll be exposed to writing non-trivial Elixir apps, you will have a much better foundation for building large scale reliable systems in any other language that you switch to later.

Thank you for these insights. I taught myself some Ruby a few years ago to prepare for a bootcamp I never ended up signing up for so I'm not averse to diving into Elixir. Not only does it have some really successful implementation but as you said a great community around it.

Also being able to watch my buddy's workflow has brought a lot of the abstract down to the tangible. So I think I'll pursue that rather than the much larger rabbit hole of JS and the numerous related frameworks and trying to reign in an effective roadmap on my own.

Not that they're insurmountable or that I'm afraid of continuous education (an obvious component of this work in general) and I'll still develop a rudimentary working knowledge of it as I assume I will invariably run into it in a real-world setting at some point. And if for no other reason than to further develop my understanding of fp vs oop at large.

 

[Stiman]

Only thing I would say is that if you’re looking to get employed in a relatively short timeframe and are unsure of roadmaps, I would suggest learning React and some level of html/css/JS.

I think there are more jobs for React devs than pretty much anything else (last I checked). You can forget about all other frameworks until you somewhat master React, at which point learning other frameworks will be much easier. The whole “which framework” thing is a huge distraction and is great low hanging fruit for content creators to make content about.

Of course, that’s if your into building web front ends. When I started my journey I thought building “websites” might be lame, but now I love it and think it’s super cool. I love web, it’s platform agnostic.

I transition to being a developer by going to a bootcamp in 2019 and couldn’t be happier with that decision.

 

[SCJR]

Only thing I would say is that if you’re looking to get employed in a relatively short timeframe and are unsure of roadmaps, I would suggest learning React and some level of html/css/JS.

I think there are more jobs for React devs than pretty much anything else (last I checked). You can forget about all other frameworks until you somewhat master React, at which point learning other frameworks will be much easier. The whole “which framework” thing is a huge distraction and is great low hanging fruit for content creators to make content about.

Of course, that’s if your into building web front ends. When I started my journey I thought building “website” might be lame, but now I love it and think it’s super cool. I love web, it’s platform agnostic.

I do the html/css modules on FCC when I only have 15-20 minute windows at work to do something quickly but productive or when I'm burned out late after work and want to make sure that I at least do something. I'm not turned off by web dev at all but while I don't know what I don't know so to speak, I've been drawn more to the back end for whatever reason.

Happy to be proven wrong of course. I just want to do something more fulfilling, mentally stimulating, and I was remote for the entirety of the pandemic so I would love to eventually get back to that. Always regretted not getting and Engineering degree and this is an avenue into that which checks most if not all of those aspirational boxes.

 

[eaeolian]

It was just early access.

Nah. Nothing's as bad as Access.

 

[Stiman]

I do the html/css modules on FCC when I only have 15-20 minute windows at work to do something quickly but productive or when I'm burned out late after work and want to make sure that I at least do something. I'm not turned off by web dev at all but while I don't know what I don't know so to speak, I've been drawn more to the back end for whatever reason.

Happy to be proven wrong of course. I just want to do something more fulfilling, mentally stimulating, and I was remote for the entirety of the pandemic so I would love to eventually get back to that. Always regretted not getting and Engineering degree and this is an avenue into that which checks most if not all of those aspirational boxes.

I totally get it. HTML and CSS are just the (boring) foundation needed to do the cool stuff. Definitely don’t judge front end just from that.

Ideally, if you knew someone who could give you a tour of a complex front end project to show you what’s possible, or what it’s like to do front end, that would be great.

Having said that, it’s totally cool if you’re into other things. There’s lots of different avenues to go down in software development.

 

[p0ke]

Only thing I would say is that if you’re looking to get employed in a relatively short timeframe and are unsure of roadmaps, I would suggest learning React and some level of html/css/JS.

I don't know how it is in the rest of the world, but over here there's a pretty big demand for all kinds of developers. But React (well, html/css/js in general) is definitely among the easier things to learn, and the tools to get into it are free...

From React it's pretty easy to transition into React-Native too, though in that case I'd suggest learning native app development too to some degree as well. We recently made a service where I first did the mobile client and then later an inexperienced web dev made a web client for the same system - he was able to reuse almost all of the business logic from the mobile app because the same libraries work on both ends. Especially the redux-side of things saved him a lot of time (unlike react in general, IMO redux is not easy to get into) and since the exact same code is used, we don't have to worry about compatibility issues. So in the end he only had to rewrite the actual UI.