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It's absolutely a viable career path. To get started, you'll want to learn enough Javascript/HTML (CSS can wait) that you understand how a frontend builds on t
by pdpi 7y ago
It's absolutely a viable career path.
To get started, you'll want to learn enough Javascript/HTML (CSS can wait) that you understand how a frontend builds on top of the data it's getting from the backend, and you'll want to learn enough Java/Python/Ruby/Node.js that you can spin up a fresh "hello world" http server in a few minutes, and enough SQL that you can back that service with a database that gives you "hello world" in a language appropriate to the request you received.
That'll give you a "full stack" core to build upon. You'll probably want to specialise either on frontend or backend work, but having that core competency with both gives you more tools to understand what you're doing on whichever one you pick.
Crucially, whatever specific languages/frameworks you pick today are unlikely to be the same you'll be using in, say, five years time, so just look at those as tools to get the job done, and focus on learning the fundamentals — Learn what's fast and what's slow, what's resilient and what's brittle, etc etc. Those are the skills that will lead you to better jobs later on.
- joelbluminator 7y ago"Crucially, whatever specific languages/frameworks you pick today are unlikely to be the same you'll be using in, say, five years time" , I think that's more true for frameworks than for languages, and even more true for front end world than backend. If he picks up java spring/.net he's gonna be good 15 years from now imo. I'd even bet on Rails/Laravel and friends to still be relevant in 15 years. Can't say that about React though.
- TomMarius 7y agoReact has now been relevant for 6 years and it's still growing AFAIK. I don't think we get to lump it into this category of coming and going JS frameworks anymore.
- strken 7y agoI'd bet on some of the core concepts from frameworks being relevant in 15 years - hierarchies of nested visual components that encapsulate raw HTML, systems which atomically update state based on incoming events, and so on.
- pdpi 7y agoI should've been clearer — Some part of this will be the usual tech churn, of course, but another part of this is that you shouldn't pigeonhole yourself into a $language developer, for whatever value of $language you chose when you first started learning. As the OP gets into the industry and starts learning stuff, there's a fair chance they'll end up changing their tech stack of choice.
- taurath 7y agoReact has been around for 6 years and seems to be getting better and more common, not less at the moment. I can't see a huge reason to switch on the horizon, wheras in the previous iterations of knockout.js, angular and ember there were some pretty clear things that were big pain points for me. In the 2009-2013 timeframe I think thats where the framework meme started - I can't say its nearly as accurate in 2019.