If you had to start over, what technologies would you learn in 2014?

Re:If you had to start over, what technologies would you lea... by macspoofing on Monday February 10, 2014 @11:52AM (#7212045)

>It's just JavaScript, JavaScript, JavaScript.

No it's not. Because JavaScript the language is so bare-bones, you need to supplement language deficiencies with frameworks and libraries. So you go and pick from a menu of Backbone/Marionette, Angular, ExtJS, Ember, Kendo, jQuery or etc. - some of them work together, some of them don't. Most of those get you part of the way there, you may still need to pull in things like require.js to manage imports. Or, instead of raw JS, you go with TypedScript, or Dart, or CoffeeScript, or whatever, and then put a framework on top of those. You're still not done, because that gets you the JS part, usually you complement it with a CSS framework (like bootstrap) and a SASS framework. In the end, you have a hodgepodge of frameworks of libraries, that plug JS holes, and functionally look and feel different.

So no, it's not simply JavaScript everywhere.

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Re:If you had to start over, what technologies would you lea... by DanHulton on Monday February 10, 2014 @12:43PM (#7212377)

It's javascript, angular, and jQuery.

Seriously, jQuery > all the other "low-level" libraries out there combined, and Angular > all the other frameworks out there combined, several times over.

If you want to interview practically anywhere, learn those three and you're solid.

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Re:If you had to start over, what technologies would you lea... by Silhouette on Monday February 10, 2014 @03:23PM (#7213521)

Angular > all the other frameworks out there combined, several times over.

Sure. But according to my in tray, last week it was Backbone, next week React is taking over the world, and by March we'll have standardised web components anyway.

It may be true that today Angular is much more popular than all the other frameworks, but if so, it will probably be a short-lived peak and IMHO says more about developers putting too much faith in frameworks generally than anything else.

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Re:If you had to start over, what technologies would you lea... by davidjnelson on Monday February 10, 2014 @07:45PM (#7214889)

Angular can easily work as a facade to the underlying es6 features coming soon.

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Re:If you had to start over, what technologies would you lea... by Silhouette on Monday February 10, 2014 @09:16PM (#7215279)

But why would you want it to? It's likely to wind up being a leaky abstraction at best, assuming it survives that long, which is far from certain given Google's track record. If you want to be bleeding edge with web components, I would have thought experimenting with Polymer would be more interesting and give an easier transition to native features as they become available. If you want a more production-ready component-style framework today, why not use React instead of Angular?

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Re:If you had to start over, what technologies would you lea... by smrtinsert on Monday February 10, 2014 @01:19PM (#7212647)

And what a depressing job that would be.

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Re:If you had to start over, what technologies would you lea... by DanHulton on Tuesday February 18, 2014 @04:17PM (#7261131)

Says you, though.

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Re:If you had to start over, what technologies would you lea... by Silhouette on Monday February 10, 2014 @01:41PM (#7212794)

Because JavaScript the language is so bare-bones, you need to supplement language deficiencies with frameworks and libraries.

Since when? It's perfectly possible to build web sites/apps, even large scale ones, using no framework at all. Pick a handy utility library, whether it's jQuery or Underscore/Lodash or whatever, and get coding.

I don't know where this idea that you somehow have to build web apps using some humungous framework came from, but I hope it relocates that rock and crawls back under it. In the history of programming, very few frameworks (as opposed to libraries) have stood the test of time.

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Re:If you had to start over, what technologies would you lea... by RussianCow on Monday February 10, 2014 @01:57PM (#7212902)

If the point is to easily be able to find work (which was the parent's emphasis), then yes, you need to learn the popular frameworks. No, it's not required for building your own web app, but companies use them, so they'll expect you to be familiar with them.

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Re:If you had to start over, what technologies would you lea... by Silhouette on Monday February 10, 2014 @03:20PM (#7213506)

Where are you based? It seems like in most places it's an employee's market right now (assuming you work for an employer). Given the diversity of front-end frameworks and how new most of the trendy ones are, I find it extremely hard to believe that anyone who's any good at front-end development and has a decent track record to prove it will be short of work any time soon, even if they don't have a full complement of buzzwords on the resume. And of course it's certainly not necessary if you're doing it for your own business or if you're consulting/freelancing and have your pick of tools.

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Re:If you had to start over, what technologies would you lea... by RussianCow on Monday February 10, 2014 @04:45PM (#7214099)

Portland, OR. I think you're probably mostly right with regards to frontend development. All my experience applying for non-contract work has been for backend positions, and I know for a fact that I lost at least two potential jobs because I didn't have the right language/framework on my résumé. But just based on my limited searching for frontend positions, it seems like companies do expect you to know at least one well-known framework really well, even if it's not the one they use. So you shouldn't need to master all of them, but you should definitely be familiar with their patterns.

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Re:If you had to start over, what technologies would you lea... by Silhouette on Monday February 10, 2014 @05:31PM (#7214301)

So you shouldn't need to master all of them, but you should definitely be familiar with their patterns.

I certainly agree with that. I'd expect anyone claiming significant front-end development skills to at least be familiar with ideas like MVC and data binding these days. I just wouldn't much care which specific tools they used to implement those things, and I wouldn't hold it against them if they'd considered their options and then chosen different designs and/or tools instead.

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Re:If you had to start over, what technologies would you lea... by shawndumas on Monday February 10, 2014 @01:44PM (#7212811)

I am stuck in a hiring war-room for the last 2 weeks (two to go). [1]

We are using jQuery/EmberJS/Bootstrap/Grunt. Everyone of the FEs agreed that experience in any JS MVC was acceptable. [2]

So while I agree that it's not JS, JS, JS but it's not quite as bad as what you're saying.

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[1]: We were having a problem getting front-end people so they had managers put 15 front-end engineers on the task full time for a month. Our mandate is 30 engineers in 30 days.

[2]: sdumas [at] yahoo-inc [dot] com if your looking!

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Re:If you had to start over, what technologies would you lea... by jared314 on Monday February 10, 2014 @02:33PM (#7213133)

> We were having a problem getting front-end people so they had managers put 15 front-end engineers on the task full time for a month

I have never heard of a hiring war-room or lockdown of that type. Are you redesigning/improving the current process, or just interviewing people until you meet the quota?

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Re:If you had to start over, what technologies would you lea... by shawndumas on Monday February 10, 2014 @08:23PM (#7215051)

both and. the talent acquisition folk were very interested in how the engineers went about finding people. they shared all of what we were doing with the other talent acquisition people at their all hands meetings.

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Re:If you had to start over, what technologies would you lea... by davidjnelson on Monday February 10, 2014 @08:37PM (#7215108)

It's a real shame you guys chose ember over angular. Why did you do that?

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Re:If you had to start over, what technologies would you lea... by shawndumas on Monday February 10, 2014 @08:53PM (#7215182)

lol, tons of reasons... a few off the top of my head; routes are central to EmberJS and are key to SPAs. AngularJS uses primitives as models which means that at the kind of scale we are hitting in our apps performance suffers (dirty checking 10k rows is killer) (also, computed props are easy, and we're into UAP). EmberJS' caching rocks.

But the big one is -- Google. When are they gonna pull the plug on AngulerJS, how broad is the contribution base outside of Google, and not using YUI was already a battle...

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Re:If you had to start over, what technologies would you lea... by greyshi on Monday February 10, 2014 @12:25PM (#7212245)

So... javascript, javascript frameworks, and javascript variants. I think "Javascript, Javascript, Javascript" was accurate enough. And Bootstrap is easy.

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Re:If you had to start over, what technologies would you lea... by macspoofing on Monday February 10, 2014 @03:41PM (#7213667)

>"Javascript, Javascript, Javascript"

Unless, Dart, CoffeeScript, TypedScript etc.

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