Some background: I've started my professional career as a full stack developer back in late 1999, before the term was popular (perhaps even before it was coined?).
I've worked a lot with HTML4, CSS3 and Javascript, but some time around 2009-2010 (I think) I got pulled away from Web dev and got into desktop applications - so while I do have the basic knowledge of how things work, I have no experience whatsoever with current frontend frameworks and technologies (Didn't even had the chance to learn JQuery, when it was the shiny new thing).
So, if I want to land a job as a fullstack developer, what should I learn?
Top comments (5)
Hmm, C#/.NET is making this a bit difficult. I would honestly recommend starting over with the basics first, HTML5, CSS, plain JS. From there, transitioning to Angular or Vue probably matches the backend experience best. I honestly don't know what C# backends commonly use on the frontend.
Thanks for your reply!
Where I live I do see some demands for .Net backend - specifically ASP.Net Core MVC (which I don't have much experience with, but I'm guessing isn't too hard to learn for someone that have worked with .Net over a decade)
Is HTML5 very different from HTML4?
Not hugely different, but some of the new elements are quite useful, and some of the changes to attributes and validation are certainly interesting to bear in mind.
My preferred approach for NET would be a Web API with JWT, and then React for the frontend. However, you may not be able to take advantage of certain features that frameworks specifically built for React come with.
It's doable, but this is one of the major disadvantages (unless NET has newer features to better integrate React / SSR)
Example: If the page you are debugging locally requires an initial payload, that data would need to be available client side when the React app boots up. Without SSR, that slows the boot time of the React app and creates an additional dependency on the data needing to be there at boot time.
I would vote to use one of the frameworks React suggests and NodeJS for the backend vs React frontend (WebPack/Typescript/React) without framework with NET backend.
If your goal is to land a job, I'd recommend you learning React. From my latest knowledge, frontend jobs that require React are still the most regular. There are some great tutorials on YouTube, my favorite being Traversy Media. It's more project oriented than others and I really came to like that.
Despite that, learning the fundamentals of HTML, CSS and Javascript is always a good idea. Some emerging technologies lately seem to be Web Components (framework agnostic) and HTMX. I'm unsure whether they'll be of much help in an interview process though.