Ask HN: How old were the most talented software engineers you've met?

Re:Ask HN: How old were the most talented software engineers... by ThirdFoundation on Thursday January 03, 2019 @09:34AM (#18815330)

I was wondering if you could give me a little advice as to what I should focus on to more specialize in the Microsoft stack?

I'm on a bit of an unusual track into software engineering, having started in finance and first teaching myself to code via VBA and SQL. That coding led to me getting a second degree in computer science, which I'll be finishing this year (and I now know way too much about VBA).

All that of that preamble to say that I've had a ton of experience with SQL Server, VBA, Excel in my old life. I think I could be a pretty good candidate to fully immerse myself in the .NET stack. However, my school doesn't touch much on the .NET technologies, focusing more on JavaScript, Python, and C++.

Would it make sense to focus on C# and move on from there? Or there other things I should know well? Do you use much PowerShell? Javascript?

Thanks! Sorry if this was a bit long.

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Re:Ask HN: How old were the most talented software engineers... by JamesBarney on Thursday January 03, 2019 @01:27PM (#18817635)

I'd be familiar with c# but it's an easy language, and there are tons of devs with c# experience.

But I'd mainly focus on JavaScript/TypeScript. And if you're about to graduate then focus really heavily on react or angular. Microsoft shops are drowning in .net talent/experience but are starving for good front end devs with deep angular or react experience.

And I wouldn't bother with powershell at all, unless you have wanted to move away from development and towards infrastructure.

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Re:Ask HN: How old were the most talented software engineers... by kgduong on Thursday January 03, 2019 @02:02PM (#18818061)

I can attest to this. Having worked in an finance shop myself, there were numerous .NET engineers there but none of which had relevant experience with Angular/React + Typescript.

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Re:Ask HN: How old were the most talented software engineers... by ThirdFoundation on Thursday January 03, 2019 @01:38PM (#18817765)

This is really helpful, thank you. I've been diving into heavy doses of JavaScript lately -- I'll continue with that and augment it with TypeScript and React too.

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Re:Ask HN: How old were the most talented software engineers... by chatmasta on Thursday January 03, 2019 @05:51PM (#18820124)

This makes sense. MS office is moving to the “cloud” and extensions are now programmed in JavaScript or TypeScript (also a Microsoft project).

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