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Discussion on: 🎉5 Dev skills that will boost your salary in 2020

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leob profile image
leob

Cool list, but including Apache Spark is a bit far fetched IMO ... if your specialty is web dev then I don't really see how it makes sense to spend time on Apache Spark, unless it's for hobby purposes.

Data science is a completely different game from web dev and it's not that trivial to get into it. Employers are not going to pay you a cool salary just because you played a bit with Apache Spark, while you don't know anything about the principles of data science.

People who are able to get good at web dev and at data science are probably an extreme rare species, in virtually all cases you would choose either one or the other to specialze in.

On the other hand, things like Docker and GraphQL would be good to add to this list :-)

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shadid12 profile image
Shadid Haque

Actually that's a good point. I was thinking of adding graphql but then I decided to mention it in the react section. As for big data I totally agree, I was little uncomfortable putting it in there. I feel like having a broad overview of how data science fits in fullstack development is a skill that can go a long way. Then again I'm no expert in data science either. As you said practically one can only be an expert in one of these.

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leob profile image
leob • Edited

Right!

However I fully agree with the other 4 items: AWS, React, Go and Redis ... all 4 are technologies that are definitely in high demand and can be used on many web dev projects.

React is a no-brainer, AWS (cloud) is definitely mainstream, and Redis is pretty ubiquitous.

Go is a bit of a special one because it goes again the trend of "everything Javascript" but I can definitely see that Go has a lot of momentum on the backend.

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dannydwarren profile image
Danny Warren

I think Apache Spark and other data streaming techs are a huge deal to web dev. At Pluralsight we are using Spark to read from Kafka and transform the data in real-time to show analytics to our customers. My team's stack was React/C#/Postgres. We're now introducing Spark using the Scala API. We're not doing data science or machine learning. We're still a web dev team, but Spark, combined with Kafaka, is so powerful it is helping us to move faster with more agility. I think it absolutely belongs on this kind of a list.

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leob profile image
leob

I can see where you're coming from, but in my book this is still "niche" and only relevant for top 5% websites/apps which need that amount of scalability and data processing. I've never had a use case for this sort of tech for the small to medium scale sites/apps that I'm building.

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dannydwarren profile image
Danny Warren

Sure. It may not be in as popular demand as the other techs on the list, but you can definitely increase your salary by learning Apache Spark. From my experience the supply of Spark devs is low so those few who know it have an advantage in the salary negotiation. I just don't want anyone to think "I shouldn't learn Spark because it won't help me increase my marketability." It is not your typical web dev work, as of today, but it could be in the future. :shrug:

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leob profile image
leob

Thanks! I'm a self-employed freelance web dev however, so that probably makes my situation slightly different. But maybe it's something that I could utilize in one of my future projects, or add to my resume to attract (more/better) clients.

Then again, there's already a mountain of interesting technologies that I want to look at (at the moment I'm looking at Blockstack and dApps, pretty cool), the problem is there are only 24 hours in a day.

But I'll definitely keep Spark at the back of my mind.

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ndy40 profile image
Ndy • Edited

I work in a shop that is heavily php based and we build a lot of reports. Query dB, do some mapping and spew out some bespoke report for different arms of the business. Sometimes the task is so long that we end up writing php logic that becomes difficult and boring to maintain and resource intensive. Apache spark can handle this with a simpler codes. I do hate building complex reports in PHP and the bulk of the task is looping and mapping and reducing.

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leob profile image
leob

Well that's interesting, puts a different perspective on things. Apache Spark and Kafka aren't things you hear a lot about and seem to be a bit outside of the mainstream so it's interesting to hear about it.

For a project which I'm currently doing I'll need to implement something like full text search (or at least powerful multidimensional search) but I guess there are other technologies that are more suitable for that than Spark/Kafka.

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kmyokoyama profile image
Kazuki Yokoyama

Yes, I pretty much agree with it. In fact I would replace Spark with Kafka.

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leob profile image
leob

Apparently (I know next to nothing about it but I'm reading one of the other posters' comments) Spark and Kafka can be used in tandem and have synergies.

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dannydwarren profile image
Danny Warren • Edited

I think Spark, for real-time web dev, needs something like Kafka so starting there is a great idea.