Me and my team in middle of our first hackathon-
a girl who is our class topper is my team mate, trying to write some Android Code.

I am writing nodejs Api, she calls me saying there's a bug in my code,so for saving time I decided to fix that small thing on her laptop,so when I went to the backend folder to open the js file,I see no default text editor set for it. After searching,I found out she had no atom,sublime,vs etc.
I asked her - "Do you even have notepad++ ?".
She - "I have notepad,but not ++".

That day I had to edit my code in Wordpad. I am still shaking.

Dear boss, please give me a more challenging project. I am sick and tired of editing someone else’s HTML and CSS which doesn’t even go through a build process and the JS is basically Jquery. It would be better if no one else can get into my codebase and the project has no relations or anywhere near our flagship product. Please involve some sysadmin tasks that I really want to learn. For front end I want to use React , boss. Or at least ES(6)=>. NodeJS would be nice too but I’m not fussy with the backend language. Even PHP would do. Please give me a genuine problem to solve, anything mathematical, machine learning would be awesome! 🙏🏻🙏🏻🙏🏻

One day my colleague says that React Js is used for frontend as well as backend. I did not agree with him also he blames that Backend API’s also can be created using React Js. I could not believe because as per I know React Js is a library for frontend not for Backend. Still, some other colleagues supported him because he is the senior developer I am an intermediate developer.

Then I ask some of my friends who are currently working on React Js, Can we use React Js for the backend? And the next day I went office and talk to my colleague that I could not found that React JS can be used for backend and backend API. And he replied You can use nodejs. Oh! Man But I think Node and React are different tools.

Hearing "do this , do this like this, that like that" every day removes passion from programming I had before. Now I'm starting to get deeper into javascript and to learn backend, and I'm working on a CMS with NodeJS and MySql backend, and vanilla JS on the client side. I like the architecture I had, and really like how I started working on it. Passion is back!

"You can never understand everything, but you can push yourself to understand the system"

If I hear this stupid quote one more time I will scream.

Node.js is a piece of shit and thanks to Ryan Dahl, we now have to deal with ugly JS not only on the frontend, but also the backend.

Is programming a website/basic backend program in TypeScript with NodeJS actually a good idea? Or should you be programming it in C#, Rust, (not PHP), Golang, etc?

I personally feel like NodeJS has pretty amazing performance considering how much less code you would write compared to the other options. Although I feel something like Rust (haven't used it yet) would be more robust but more work.

Note: I only currently know JS, TS, C#, Go and obviously HTML, CSS

Trying to make a nodejs backend is pure hell. It doesn't contain much builtin functionality in the first place and so you are forced to get a sea of smaller packages to make something that should be already baked in to happen. Momentjs and dayjs has thought nodejs devs nothing about the fact node runtime must not be as restrained as a browser js runtime. Now we are getting temporal api in browser js runtime and hopefully we can finally handle timezone hell without going insane. But this highlights the issue with node. Why wait for it to be included in js standard to finally be a thing. develop it beforehand. why are you beholden to Ecma standard. They write standards for web browser not node backend for god sake.

Also, authentication shouldn't be that complicated. I shouldn't be forced to create my own auth. In laravel scaffolding is already there and is asking you to get it going. In nodejs you have to get jwt working. I understand that you can get such scaffolding online with git clone but why? why express doesn't provide buildtin functions for authentication? Why for gods sake, you "npm install bcrypt"? I have to hash my own password before hand. I mean, realistically speaking nodejs is builtin with cryptography libraries. Hashmap literally uses hashing. Why can't it be builtin. I supposed any API needed auth. Instead I have to sign and verfiy my token and create middlewares for the job of making sure routes are protected.

I like the concept of bidirectional communication of node and the ugly thing, it's not impressive. any goddamn programming language used for web dev should realistically sustain two-way communication. It just a question of scaling, but if you have a backend that leverages usockets you can never go wrong. Because it's written in c. Just keep server running and sending data packets and responding to them, and don't finalize request and clean up after you serve it just keep waiting for new event.

Anyway, I hope out of this confused mess we call nodejs backend comes clean solutions just like Laravel came to clean the mess that was PHP backend back then.

Express is overrated by the way, and mongodb feels like a really ludicrous idea. we now need graphql in goddamn backend because of mongodb and it's cousins of nosql databases.

Backend wise

After a year and a half of working with what i love (nodejs microservices and bit of python) I have to update my php skills and refresh my memory with latest Laravel 😕 (I used it as an authentication/authorisation and REST backend for a react native app early 2016 and did not touch it since)

Passive Job hunting sux and yes PHP ain't my thing anymore 😔 i mean i have next to 6-8 years exp in it but given the choice... 😒

I used to love it (so many good memory with cakephp 😌🙄it teached me a lot early in my carrer) before I discover functional programming paradigm and got deep understanding of JS

Sophomore year starting soon so I'm looking for new project (s) to complete in parallel with the studies.
Some are more design-y and some more backend-y but I recently started getting better at designing so :)

1) Learn some fragment shader stuff. I've always been messing around with graphics and have a game on steam, so I think that's a good idea to be paired with signal processing.

2) Reactive web services. Preferably with spring-boot or vert.x but

3) I would also like to dive into golang (and make some reactive thing with it)

4) WebAssembly seems nice... But I got some concerns

5) exercise making wireframes -> CSS (with some js)

6) I've never really done any real backed work with nodejs, except serving and aot compiling js, or doing gulp tasks

7) Implementing a whole project, or a fraction of it as serverless on aws

* I'm definitely going to use a couple very simple services to make a docker swarm with load balancing, etc, just because I know how everything works but got no practical knowledge

8) Design an esports jersey for the university department I'm in (shouldn't take long)

So what do you guys think? Recommendations are welcome :)

P.S. last year in review:
> A webapp running on a raspberry pi powering a reflex testing game on gpio (java/spring-boot , codename: buttonmasher)
> small Elastic search cluster to monitor some random university servers through kibana dashboards
> laser tracking on wall of *any* colour and variable light conditions via a webcam (opencv) , controlling the mouse pointer, whether you run it against a projector or any wall
> jstrain.herokuapp.com => a small JavaScript powered tool with a DSL to help you train more efficiently without a coach
> Various random Photoshop stuff