So, approximately 3 years ago I posted my first entry which tackled the question of what should I go next on my web developer career.
At the time, I had finished a mid-size project with my employer, with the opportunity to choose a tech stack, design and develop the architecture of the application. It was an SPA developed with AngularJs and ASP.NET Web API REST endpoints to interface with production services on a shop-floor application. I cannot say it was the best job on the whole dev team, but considering the level of success, it did pretty good.
Anyway, new challenges were arising and it was obvious that a choice had to be made: Angular or React. Why? because that's the way JS web frameworks evolve right? Having more than 10 years using .NET ecosystem of tools and apps, it seems like it is more of a corporate environment that moves slowly, compared to the new JS frameworks surging every few months.
Well then, after all this time the result was that now Angular is my weapon of choice for web development. And there where a few attempts with React (nothing really for "production").
Hopefully, these days the Angular community seems to me stronger than ever (that seemed as a weak point before, compare to other options).
I don't think it's necessary to debate wether or not it was a good decision, whatever happens is experience and something to learn. So now the next step is to take this experience and continue the journey. It's still just the beginning.
Top comments (5)
As much as I understand what you are saying, I would advice to get deeper knowledge in the fundamentals and standards of HTML, CSS and JS. Only on a further level look at the framework of choice.
Frameworks can change, vanish and disappear, but standards won't.
Definitely, great point. Didn't pay much attention to that before but nowadays it is a priority for me, forgot to mention something about that, have had to go and study about the basics (mostly JS) many times. Sometimes we take that for granted only to realize that the problem is on the fundamentals. Thanks!
"Web development" is so much bigger than any one framework (Rendering on the Web).
The choice of framework influences the style of web solution which tends to favour certain application domains.
My assessment would be that Angular's space is primarily "internal corporate web applications" because enterprises love "batteries included" solutions, target primarily desktop PCs and have infrastructures that make its relative "heaviness" irrelevant and don't care if the resulting application isn't the snappiest in the world (where is "the user" going to go anyway?; Angular Usage Statistics).
So if you're able to continue to work in that kind of environment you're likely set.
Initially I viewed Vue as a bit of "destination for Angular refugees" which slimmed it down to its core and then started adopting "good ideas" from other sources but it's been doing its own thing for a while. There was a time where some places seemed to migrate from Angular(JS) to Vue "to simplify development" - not sure whether that is still going on.
And while the React (& Next.js) devotees constantly promote it as unopionated, it's no silver bullet either and is often used in sub-optimal places.
To make things worse Angular/Vue/React/Svelte/Solid mostly cover various flavours of SPA.
To get a glimpse at some of the more recent directions have a look at
Understanding Transitional JavaScript Apps
Ryan Carniato for This is Learning ・ Nov 12 '21 ・ 6 min read
Meanwhile recently
jQuery 1.6.4 dates back to 2011-09-12!
So some of Amazon's pages use 10+ year old client side technology while (presumably) some custom Java-based server rendering pipeline that has been constantly tuned and tweaked over the years is capable of producing the necessary content with minimal latency—just so the customer won't get distracted.
As already mentioned the "fundamentals and standards of HTML, CSS and JS" have merit—going forward having a good understanding of how the public web works and what the constraints are (The Fallacies of Distributed Computing (Applied to Front-End Performance)) could be more useful than trying to get into yet another framework specific mindset (at this point).
The idea being is that one should have enough foundational knowledge to competently assess the needs of any particular "problem" and judge which web technologies are a suitable choice towards a solution (provided there still is a choice)—rather that being a "hammer, everything looks like a nail" type of framework developer).
Thank you for the feedback, it's really valuable! Sometimes one can get distracted with all the information out there, trying to stay updated, while disregarding what actually matters. This is a motivation to keep writing and posting opinions, as it is a realization of how little I truly know and how much to keep learning.
As new dev, with 1.5 years of experience i have been suggested that move to web 3.0 as its the future and have a bright career ahead
May i have some advice from here?