I've been rotating between essentially 3 languages: Typescript/Javascript (I'm bundling these together as 1), Ruby and C#. I think I'll stick with these 3 for a while.
C# is basically there for my personal enjoyment and to maybe make a unity game down the line. It also allows me to write better Typescript since Typescript deals with types and all the such as well.
Typescript/Javascript will be for my front-end work.
I'm really enjoying Typescript. It is pretty much a superset of ES6, along with a few added features like type-checking. It makes my code feel much more structured and it is a lot easier to understand what functions do when you have types attached to them. I also am very glad that ES6 added classes, even though it is built over the prototypal system. No longer do you have to use the function keyword as your 'class', although it still transpiles down to that. Code is much cleaner than the normal weird way in Javascript(ES5 and below).
I've decided to learn Ruby as well and will be using Ruby on Rails for my back-end work. I decided to go ahead and spend time learning Ruby simply because I don't want to get shut out of one of the big frontiers on web development and I've actually been more productive in a few hours of Ruby on Rails than weeks on Node.js. Once I get the hang of working on the server-side with Ruby, then I'll return to Node.js. I find Node.js makes me focus on too much of the trees as opposed to seeing the forest since it is so low-level.
Now that I've whittled down to my core technologies, I should be a lot more productive. In terms of productivity, if you are doing web development, take the time to learn grunt or another task runner. It is EXTREMELY helpful. A task runner essentially allows you to automate a ton of tasks. Using grunt with a few plug-ins allows the computer to automatically compile typescript files to js, sass or less files to css and to automatically update the view in the browser whenever you update one of your files. Bower is another pretty cool package. It's pretty much like npm or bundle in the ruby community, except for the front-end. It lets you go to the command line and install front-end packages just by typing a command. It beats going to the jQuery website, downloading that, the Bootstrap website, downloading that, etc.
Sometimes it feels like I'm in an echo chamber in here. What are you guys doing on the programming front?
