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I would tell anyone getting into web development right now that if you want to be in high demand, become a JS wizard. And of course, the front-end is part of th

by gexla 13y ago

I would tell anyone getting into web development right now that if you want to be in high demand, become a JS wizard. And of course, the front-end is part of the package unless you box yourself into Node. To get to the level the author is talking about is quite daunting. I feel that JS is sort of a second class citizen to most back-end developers. Web projects which are touched by an HTML / CSS developer, a designer and a back-end developer are common (not always a team, maybe they are all contracted to do their bits as needed and don't work closely together.) Often the heavy lifting with the JS goes to the back-end dev because the HTML / CSS dev isn't really a programmer beyond Googling for Jquery snippets. The problem is, the back-end developer usually isn't a JS wizard either. A lot of developers I come across make a mess of copy and paste in the JS. And I don't spend enough time in JS for it to feel natural to me. If I could add one superpower to make my life way easier, it would be the things the author is talking about. I see a lot of threads with people asking what to learn. If you are going to be a web developer, then JS is always a damn good answer (or if you already know JS, go back and level up.) I really love to spend time on the server side. I want to put my time into Linux, spend a lot of time in Go and learning other languages. But that doesn't make a lot of sense for a freelance web developer. ETA: Actually, high in demand is probably the wrong way to put it. You don't have to be in high demand. Small markets can be as lucrative or better than much larger markets. And then there the fact that there is a lot more to being a successful web developer than being a code-monkey. But the things the author described is certainly a super power in web development.

weland 13y ago
> I feel that JS is sort of a second class citizen to most back-end developers. I'm not what one might consider a back-end developer (or a web developer at all, for that matter), but the overgrowth of web tools in the web 2.0 aftermath has made web tools somewhat hard to ignore as of late, so I had to sporadically develop what can be considered back-end code. Even front-end, which I have done grudgingly. To me, JS -- and in fact the whole web environment -- is a second-class citizen. I come from a vastly different background (embedded and systems programming), and the fact that people manage to write anything useful with today's web technologies is astounding. I honestly admire the craftiness of web developers, although I have very few good words to say about pretty much anything else that comes out of their hands. I cannot help seeing them as second-class citizens because: 1. They are simply tools made for different purpose. HTML is there to annotate the structure of some content, CSS is to annotate its appearance, JS is for some limited interaction. What people managed to build with these limited tools, compared to the crap we were writing the last time when I seriously touched web programming (let's just say that PHP wasn't yet popular when that happened), is astounding, but I cannot help wondering if the web wouldn't be a lot better if people had actually stopped to think about better tools for a moment. Every time I see yet another awesome demonstration of a JS game, my initial enthusiasm is chased away by the realization that thirty years later, people are still enthusiastic about stuff you could make on an Amiga, were it not for the gazillion cycles wasted between the hundreds of abstraction layers involved in painting a pixel and for the latency involved with pretty much every I/O operation. 2. It's shaggy. Dear God, it's shaggy, full of barely-documented hacks. If you want your webpage to have a drop-down menu, there's a thousand something.js packages that help you do that, but all of them have their own quirks, their own issues with styling, their own little manner of use and so on. It reminds me of writing X11 applications using nothing but Xlib, when everyone was using their own menu widget that worked in a slightly different manner from every other application. The Unix desktop was not too fun to use back then, and the fact that people not only consider that kind of behaviour to be OK now, but actually want it, is beyond comprehension to me. It doesn't help that a large portion of the community seems to struggle with even the most basic programming concepts, which makes reading source code or documentation a very unpleasant experience. 3. The tooling is terrible (but this one is becomming less and less of a grievance).

by gexla 13y ago

weland 13y ago

> I feel that JS is sort of a second class citizen to most back-end developers. I'm not what one might consider a back-end developer (or a web developer at all, for that matter), but the overgrowth of web tools in the web 2.0 aftermath has made web tools somewhat hard to ignore as of late, so I had to sporadically develop what can be considered back-end code. Even front-end, which I have done grudgingly. To me, JS -- and in fact the whole web environment -- is a second-class citizen. I come from a vastly different background (embedded and systems programming), and the fact that people manage to write anything useful with today's web technologies is astounding. I honestly admire the craftiness of web developers, although I have very few good words to say about pretty much anything else that comes out of their hands. I cannot help seeing them as second-class citizens because: 1. They are simply tools made for different purpose. HTML is there to annotate the structure of some content, CSS is to annotate its appearance, JS is for some limited interaction. What people managed to build with these limited tools, compared to the crap we were writing the last time when I seriously touched web programming (let's just say that PHP wasn't yet popular when that happened), is astounding, but I cannot help wondering if the web wouldn't be a lot better if people had actually stopped to think about better tools for a moment. Every time I see yet another awesome demonstration of a JS game, my initial enthusiasm is chased away by the realization that thirty years later, people are still enthusiastic about stuff you could make on an Amiga, were it not for the gazillion cycles wasted between the hundreds of abstraction layers involved in painting a pixel and for the latency involved with pretty much every I/O operation. 2. It's shaggy. Dear God, it's shaggy, full of barely-documented hacks. If you want your webpage to have a drop-down menu, there's a thousand something.js packages that help you do that, but all of them have their own quirks, their own issues with styling, their own little manner of use and so on. It reminds me of writing X11 applications using nothing but Xlib, when everyone was using their own menu widget that worked in a slightly different manner from every other application. The Unix desktop was not too fun to use back then, and the fact that people not only consider that kind of behaviour to be OK now, but actually want it, is beyond comprehension to me. It doesn't help that a large portion of the community seems to struggle with even the most basic programming concepts, which makes reading source code or documentation a very unpleasant experience. 3. The tooling is terrible (but this one is becomming less and less of a grievance).