I have been messing around with some hobby coding…these are my thoughts on the process.
12/16/19
Deciding to code is one thing, deciding what to code with is another larger thing. There are so many tools available to me as a developer. I have spent most of my development time in the past working with WordPress and Asp.net type things. I probably cannot even link up to a Linux server with SSH if you offered me a million dollars to do so. The question is what tools, languages and frameworks are even worth messing with? This is where I get to be a business analyst for a few minutes.
I want to work with technology that lets me do cool things, and might make me employable. These are good criteria. My bent has been towards using various Microsoft technologies because that is where most of my experience had been. I am also open to doing some PHP and LAMP stack development. I looked at all the recent job postings for developers in the area and these tech stacks seem to be used a fair amount in the area. There is also a lot of talk about React and Angular, I don’t know how I feel about big JavaScript things at the moment though. These things seem to change pretty fast, and I’m not sure about building my house on that particular sand. So for now I will use JavaScript as it comes to me, but not get too deep.
With these considerations I have decided to play with DotNet things and LAMP type stacks. These stacks line up with my experience the most, so I can leverage that into building more cooler things fasterer. I don’t see much job potential locally with full stack JavaScript, so that is a maybe later kind of thing. I am not looking for a job coding at the moment, but employability is a good tiebreaker when it comes to picking tech to focus on. I do like the fact that these are big stacks with lots of stuff around them in the ecosystem. I see no need to jump into niche stuff just for the sake of doing it. That decision will make itself when the time comes.
The process of picking technologies was rather simple, I think I made good choices here. Next up is building some cool and useful stuff, or napping, or listening to history podcasts. All options are available to me.