Software Development and Programming Careers (Official Discussion Thread)

[Apollo Creed]

Honestly I don't consider QA lowly at all, there's just levels to it. Automation gets you paid better than manual. And my current position is an internship so I know there's better pay available once I drop the intern label. It just feels lowly on days when I have nothing to do because all my prep is done and the devs aren't ready for their work to be tested.

Your path sounds similar to a lot of BAs/Scrum masters I've met so far. I'm thinking about getting a scrum master cert on my own within the next year.

Might look at Scrum cert in the future

 

[badvillain]

Do they allow you to use frameworks or are you swimming in mediaqueries over there?

Client-side frameworks? I prefer to code from scratch as must as possible - Bootstrap, Foundation, etc are all bloated. They work well in team settings with different levels of experience - but that buttery, jank-free, 60fps, quick painting, etc come from knowing every line in your code. My Sass mixin game is good though.

The place I'm at is real developer friendly when it comes to stacks/frameworks on projects by letting the lead dev for that project decide (huge company so you're a project lead all the time). The client work is boring though - so I take the opportunity to just work on "process/devops" things. The last project I did was an SPA (a non-js fallback solution too) written in ES6 with Gulp, Babel, Libsass, Handlebars and a DigitalOcean Dokku qa/dev server for CI.

But the agile/scrum groupthink shyt and daily standups are just too much. I just want to code - not be in some ass hat's excel/word docs all day. I hate all the fukking calls too.

I'm a Linux (Arch Linux what up) hobbyist too, in addition to the web app stuff I do for a living. I'm researching/attempting to build my own Desktop (gtk based) and also trying to learn enough that I'll be able to start a Cross-Platform Native App framework like React Native that compiles into Native Apps for Cocoa, Universal Windows, GTK, QT, iOS and Android.

 

[Kufismack]

I'm trying to step my javascript game way up. The job market for javascript is insane. My server side skills are tight already how do you practice javascript?

alot of people want angular.js as well

 

[Kufismack]

C# is extremely easy to learn if you already know Java

EDIT: My bad doubleposted...

 

[Kufismack]

C# is extremely easy to learn if you already know Java

Except C# overall makes Java look like absolute shyt.

On the flip side Java is more portable so...

 

[Sane]

Client-side frameworks? I prefer to code from scratch as must as possible - Bootstrap, Foundation, etc are all bloated. They work well in team settings with different levels of experience - but that buttery, jank-free, 60fps, quick painting, etc come from knowing every line in your code. My Sass mixin game is good though.

The place I'm at is real developer friendly when it comes to stacks/frameworks on projects by letting the lead dev for that project decide (huge company so you're a project lead all the time). The client work is boring though - so I take the opportunity to just work on "process/devops" things. The last project I did was an SPA (a non-js fallback solution too) written in ES6 with Gulp, Babel, Libsass, Handlebars and a DigitalOcean Dokku qa/dev server for CI.

But the agile/scrum groupthink shyt and daily standups are just too much. I just want to code - not be in some ass hat's excel/word docs all day. I hate all the fukking calls too.

I'm a Linux (Arch Linux what up) hobbyist too, in addition to the web app stuff I do for a living. I'm researching/attempting to build my own Desktop (gtk based) and also trying to learn enough that I'll be able to start a Cross-Platform Native App framework like React Native that compiles into Native Apps for Cocoa, Universal Windows, GTK, QT, iOS and Android.

 

[badvillain]

alot of people want angular.js as well

My advice: fukk Angular,learn ES6. This year/next year you'll start seeing a major shift away from frameworks like that.

But if you are going to mess with Angular - jump right to 2.0. Knowing any Angular 1.x.x stuff will be the equivalent of knowing ActionScript in 2015.

Some critiques of Angular from around the web:

http://larseidnes.com/2014/11/05/angularjs-the-bad-parts/
http://www.thoughtworks.com/insights/blog/angularjs-bad-bits
http://ruoyusun.com/2013/05/25/things-i-wish-i-were-told-about-angular-js.html

 

[semtex]

See this is the shyt I hate about javascript. All these goddamn frameworks. Maybe they're just band aids for the ugliness of javascript.

 

[kevm3]

I'm trying to step my javascript game way up. The job market for javascript is insane. My server side skills are tight already how do you practice javascript?

I have a gang of books that I go through one by one. The beautiful thing about Javascript is that you can do both front-end and server-side. One of my favorite Javascript books is:

www.amazon.com/Professional-JavaScript-Developers-Nicholas-Zakas/dp/1118026691/ref=sr_1_sc_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1431011544&sr=8-1-spell&keywords=professional+javarscipt

Here are some free resources as well:

http://addyosmani.com/resources/essentialjsdesignpatterns/book/

http://speakingjs.com/

http://eloquentjavascript.net/

 

[kevm3]

See this is the shyt I hate about javascript. All these goddamn frameworks. Maybe they're just band aids for the ugliness of javascript.

Something you may want to eventually pick up as well is Typescript. The problem with Angular 1 is that it is obsolete. The team at google are making Angular 2, which won't be backwards compatible with Angular 1 and it will allow you to use Typescript.

You're right about there being countless frameworks in the Javascript world. It can be difficult to choose one, but then again, you have a ton of choice, so if you don't like one, you don't have to use it. One framework that I really like that combines both the front-end and back-end is meteor.js

 

[badvillain]

See this is the shyt I hate about javascript. All these goddamn frameworks. Maybe they're just band aids for the ugliness of javascript.

But ES6 is looking sexy: https://github.com/lukehoban/es6features

 

[badvillain]

Something you may want to eventually pick up as well is Typescript. The problem with Angular 1 is that it is obsolete. The team at google are making Angular 2, which won't be backwards compatible with Angular 1 and it will allow you to use Typescript.

You're right about there being countless frameworks in the Javascript world. It can be difficult to choose one, but then again, you have a ton of choice, so if you don't like one, you don't have to use it. One framework that I really like that combines both the front-end and back-end is meteor.js

I'm just very against monolithic opinionated frameworks (esp. by Google because they abandon failing/old projects w the quickness). I try to stick with the UNIX philosophy of "Do one thing and do it well".

 

[semtex]

I'm reading up on OOP in javascript and boy what a mess. It's so much cleaner in Java and c#

 

[kevm3]

I'm just very against monolithic opinionated frameworks (esp. by Google because they abandon failing/old projects w the quickness). I try to stick with the UNIX philosophy of "Do one thing and do it well".

I'm not a fan of Angular either, especially since google has been trying hard to replace javascript... first with dart, and they were originally going to try to push their new language 'atscript' with angular2.0 until they eventually switched to typescript, which I am guessing is in some response due to the backlash.

 

[kevm3]

I'm reading up on OOP in javascript and boy what a mess. It's so much cleaner in Java and c#

OOP is way easier in java and C#. I've been learning javascript for nearly 2 years and I still don't really have a full grasp on the prototypal system. I can use it if necessary, but I still need to spend more time to figure exactly what is going on. When you get to the keyword 'this', it will be even more maddening. Another quirk is that there is no block scope, only functional scope from ES5 down.

Typescript may be interesting though, since it has the more familiar class-based inheritance system and it compiles down to Javascript:
http://www.typescriptlang.org/Tutorial