Web development is fine. - There are loads of options for the back-end – Rails if you're building something CRUDdy, Java if you're building something enterpris

Web development is fine. - There are loads of options for the back-end – Rails if you're building something CRUDdy, Java if you're building something enterprise-y, Go if you're building a simple API, Node if you like Javascript… They're all suited to particular niches, and it's great. - The front-end is getting much better. For quite a while we had nothing except mad DOM-twiddling, then we had jQuery (which helped to some extent), now we have better frameworks that work more effectively with the way we want to develop apps. And there are options there too – React can help to control view complexity, for example, or you can go right ahead and build a full SPA using Angular or Ember or whatever. Now I'm no fan of using Node for a server app. Personal opinion is that there's no requirements that aren't fulfilled better by another language. And indeed, I'm often frustrated by the extent to which people develop SPAs for things that should be static sites - Blogger, I'm looking at you. But you know what? I'd take this in a second over the buggy soup of untested PHP, incompatible browsers, Prototype.js, IE6 and so on from only six or seven years ago. It's so incomparably better in every way.