So all the new frontend work needs to be completed with a proprietary toolset called Telerik. Before I was contented to submit to all the frontend tasks as it won me more Vue experience, but now that won’t be the case.

Will it be harder to sell my skillset to another company? Companies only get Telerik if they pay the cash.

Frontend developer mainly, getting all excited by C#, net core, apis, http, databases. A new world of trinkets and hard-edged engineering. Makes me eyes glitter.

But my day job needs me to become as proficient as possible on the frontend of the stack. As we warm up to a huge application rewrite, with me as the sole frontender, it becomes clearer and clearer that, if I am not only to survive, but leave a codebase behind me that is clean, thoughtful, well modularised and built with maintenance and performance in mind, that I must let go. I have to focus.

I feel a little sad today. Somehow, right now, the frontend world does not feel as exciting. Javascript feels loose, unpredictable...my work open as well to everyone with every flavour of opinion. Because it is observable.

But I am mortal. Time is precious, and limited. I feel I need a dose of curiosity discipline and that, if I can do so, I can devote myself not to my coming and going whims of interest, but the real hard work of learning craftsmanship once that feeling of glitter has faded.

My brothers and sisters, steady my hand.

Any Mozilla Firefox Debugger open-sorcerers active in the devRant community?

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OP: https://mobile.twitter.com/jbwol/...

Can confirm. It is really like this.

Lead dev asks me to take on the restful api aspect to a new internal tool UI I have been building. Happy for the challenge, I spend the 4 days (half of that in my own time), writing out 1k lines of C# that I endeavoured to keep clean, thoroughly decoupled and something I can be proud of.

I give regular updates.

This morning he responds to my last update “we already have most of that code in place”.

This stuff happens a lot. Back of a fagpacket planning and then cries all around when it INVARIABLY goes wrong.

Does this kind of bullshit happen in a properly organised, Agile team? We are about to take on a huge project and frankly I want to save myself the ballache and go find a well oiled team if what I am witnessing isnt just how things are in software land, but as I rather suspect a product of lack of communication and organisation.

Confessions of a javascripter: C# is beautiful.

That is all.

I don’t just want to learn how to scrap together applications.

I want to become an engineer; one that can wear that badge properly.

I spent a day or two reading my peers code base in .NET Core to start learning its wizarding ways. I found myself emulating some of the patterns.

Then I found a tutorial series on putting together a correctly decoupled RESTful API...the same chap wrote an SDK for Azure CosmoDB.

THIS is what I am talking about.

I can’t believe these guys at work have twenty years C# experience between them and they are churning out this shit for more than 1.5x my salary.

I want to become this but I swear half the coding world does NOT care.

Lead dev: “There’s something you have to remember: text-center aligns more than just text”

Me:

To those who have worked in mad RAD solo environments, with next to no testing...

...and those who have worked full Agile, with high code coverage, code review amongst hoards of T-shaped developers...

...how much difference does it make to wellbeing and upskilling in the two?

Bonus points if you have done both and can compare in an n=1 way.

The days are long right now. The company portal, that I built, is being rebuilt now that we have decided it needs to be responsively designed.

I always knew there would come times in my career, if I leant towards the front end, that periods of time would be taken up with HTML/CSS.

I just didn’t appreciate how soul sucking it can be when you are adjusting margins for 8hrs a day for a few weeks. And how much that is compounded by people changing their minds on things that cascade throughout an increasingly complex system of media queries...how you can spend ages tweaking something only to find it breaks on an another screen size...

The love I found in coding...it is not here...

Has anyone here built a functioning blockchain from scratch? I’ve been poking around looking for resources, preferably eBooks, but hoping to find some that have been road tested. Language/technology neutral; more interested in the quality of the guide and result.

Now that I know I can plug vim emulators into most of the IDEs, the idea of mastering the keyboard flow seems a lot more viable.

Become a veritable master of front end development, and then take to digital nomadism, and wait to see which of these kill me first: the Bali heat, the opium or the tutuks

Jetbrains Rider is a VASTLY SUPERIOR ALTERNATIVE TO “VISUAL STUDIO 2019”

Wake up Microsoft, ffs WAKE UP. I cant BELIEVE YOU ARE MAKING MY LIFE WORSE NOW

I can get better syntax highlighting and save features on a fucking gameboy

I had mentioned before I got offered a new role, with 50% increase.

I wasn’t expecting my current employer to counter, but they suddenly shat themselves and basically matched the salary, and offered promotion to software developer (sans junior). They acknowledge my role within the company is only increasing in responsibility and so far I have exceeded expectations. Its a nice response to have from them, although I do wonder how long it might have taken without the panic.

The new company have counter-countered, promising to raise salary by a further 20% of total, within the first 6 months, provided I learn React reasonably quickly (about a month), integrate with the team and start to take on my roles within the Agile set relatively independently (3-6 months). They also don’t bother with the junior role title at these pay bandings.

I currently get about half an hour a week with my lead dev on sticking issues. In this new team, I would be one of ten javascripters, working towards best practices, TDD etc. This is absolutely the realm I want to specialise in, at the first stage of my career.

I said I would stay with my current employer, before the counter counter move. Now I am full of doubt.

Has anyone landed in teams like this, only to find they didn’t offer increased learning at all? If that was a high risk for me, I wouldnt take it, despite the offer of more cash. I’d sooner get more skilled in the stuff I have been working in at my current role.

Pretty amazing how much amazing life experiences can cause anxiety. Never been in the middle of a bidding war before...

I never finished it, but before I was working in the industry, I was coding through a book called Build Your Own AngularJS. My intent was to have piecemeal instruction/example in TDD and code way above the level of complexity I was used to. You essentially build the core of AngularJS in about 900 unit tests with total coverage. 1000pages long, its no walk in the park.

I gave it up when my time was short, and focused on higher level concepts: building apps, learning tools of the trade.

Now that I am getting plenty of exposure to that level, I am thinking my free learning hours may be better spent going down into the complex worlds shown in this book. A couple of things I found there really stayed with me and shaped how I think about problems. It was also very illuminating to see how complex algorithms work “in the wild”. I cant stand learning algorithms in isolation, generally speaking.

Has anyone seen this book? I know the framework itself is older now, but I don’t think that is much relevant for this learning use case.

I only know of one student who completed this. Took him a few months. He is an absolute machine.

Won a new job; 50% payrise which, for a junior, is a pretty big deal.

A bigger team, with more established practices, a commitment to testing and code coverage, code reviews, and a smaller learning surface area as I go forward (focusing entirely on the js ecosystem, 80% frontend).

So this is all good.

But I *have* to go back to Windows. Windows *7*. Their infosec practices move at a glacial pace. After two glorious years on mac/linux I feel like being sick.

How many of you folks here consider yourself specialist in a certain area? Was this deliberate, and has it paid off? My lead dev is always trying to bestow upon me the advantages of being a generalist in this industry, and yet the employers I have spoken to, on the whole, seem to get most excited by “experts”. If it fits the expert they, want, of course...

So I have a date tomorrow. First meeting in person. I’ve got a little time to kill before hand, and need to learn Dart anyway....so I thought it would be fun to code her up something interactive. Kinda like that game Mr and Mrs. Only in the terminal, and for nerds.

Features, ladies and gentleman?

Our lead dev has convinced the board to move the new software suite forward into .Net Core 3. Much of his reasoning is sound, a mainstay of which is the cost and ease of hiring developers to actually make and maintain it.

My own roadmap with the company focuses around one of these products, so I am to become the core developer and maintainer. Given thats the case, given that my primary skill is with Javascript/Node and given that we have deadlines, I am going to make the case today that this product might be better built in Node.

We are going for a microservices architecture. Combined with Typescript for type safety as the code base gets bigger, I am not sure I can think of many real advantages to choosing .NET instead. It will benefit from its async I/O later too, as the plan is to build in API driven dynamic UI down the road.

He is a fierce man, and I am the junior. Wish me luck.

You know that coding - a primarily digital activity, is getting serious when you get out your pencil and paper IDE.

1. Makes account on CodeWars to see what the fuss is about, have a bit of fun on a quiet weekend etc.
2. Does a few 7kyu challenges, feels neat.
3. 4hrs later is 10 commits into a 1kyu level challenge called PuzzleFighter.

WHY DO I DO THIS

For those with hiring experience, or just informed opinions.

Candidate A:
1.5 years self-taught web development, primarily Javascript, but also Ruby & Golang
6 months commercial front end experience
Brucey Bonus: a significant fullstack personal project (deployed), plus lots of smaller projects. Has focused a lot on learning OOP and functional paradigm principles.

Candidate B:
As candidate A, but instead of a personal project, has made a couple dozen PRs on a big open source project (ie Mozilla’s debugger). They seem to have eschewed really dialling down into algorithms/paradigms, preferring to learn “in the wild”.

They both perform equally well in interview tests, and appear to be engaging, hardworking and approachable.

Which one do you pick, and why?

Ok, so I need some clarity from you good folk, please.

My lead developer is also my main mentor, as I am still very much a junior. He carved out most of his career in PHP, but due to his curious/hands-on personality, he has become proficient with Golang, Docker, Javascript, HTML/CSS.

We have had a number of chats about what I am best focusing on, both personally and related to work, and he makes quite a compelling case for the "learn as many things as possible; this is what makes you truly valuable" school of thought. Trouble is, this is in direct contrast to what I was taught by my previously esteemed mentor, Gordon Zhu from watchandcode.com. "Watch and Code is about the core skills that all great developers possess. These skills are incredibly important but sound boring and forgettable. They’re things like reading code, consistency and style, debugging, refactoring, and test-driven development. If I could distill Watch and Code to one skill, it would be the ability to take any codebase and rip it apart. And the most important component of that ability is being able to read code."

As you can see, Gordon always emphasised language neutrality, mastering the fundamentals, and going deep rather than wide. He has a ruthlessly high barrier of entry for learning new skills, which is basically "learn something when you have no other option but to learn it".

His approach served me well for my deep dive into Javascript, my first language. It is still the one I know the best and enjoy using the most, despite having written programs in PHP, Ruby, Golang and C# since then. I have picked up quite a lot about different build pipelines, development environments and general web development as a result of exposure to these other things, so it isn't a waste of time.

But I am starting to go a bit mad. I focus almost exclusively on quite data intensive UI development with Vue.js in my day job, although there is an expectation I will help with porting an app to .NET Core 3 in a few months. .NET is rather huge from what I have seen so far, and I am seriously craving a sense of focus. My intuition says I am happiest on the front end, and that focusing on becoming a skilled Javascript engineer is where I will get the biggest returns in mastery, pay and also LIFE BALANCE/WELLBEING...

Any thoughts, people? I would be interested to hear peoples experiences regarding depth vs breadth when it comes to the real world.

I think one of the hardest experiences as a junior is the oscillation from perceived competency to perceived incompetency.

I just spent the last 4 weeks putting together my first major UI set of components for a financial calculator. Uses Vue, Quasar, a lot of data transformation and reactive UI programming. I felt quite chuffed. Its pending merge.

Then my lead asked me to help him debug something on the flagship and legacy project; for educational purposes, not that he actually needs my help. The application is 100x the size of the one I have been working on, and monolithic. Orders of magnitude more complex.

The jump from a sense of “I might be able to do this” to “I could never do that” was almost soul destroying. Like looking back over the last ten meters you ran, realising that running is hard and you did it. Only to look ahead and realise there are easily 100 miles ahead of you.

How the fuck do you cope with that.