I've been a Java/Spring Boot developer for the majority of my professional career and I'm working to broaden my skill-set beyond that so I've been learning JS and web development in my spare time.
The web development ecosystem seems large to say the least, and I feel like it's a tough move out of the back-end space given the problem sets and things to learn.
What's been the dev communities experiences changing primary language/tech stack, has it been easy for you to switch it up?
Top comments (4)
I had been kind of full stackish in several places because we were primarily small companies, but in a couple, frontend was a dedicated job so I did not work on frontend in those places.
Having said that, the majority of my career has been in the .NET ecosystem. In 2016, I dropped .NET completely and just went all in on the JS ecosystem. (I tweeted the wrong year in the Tweet below 🙃)
All this to say, even though I was already familiar with the frontend space, it still was a move that I made which I doubted myself and was very nervous to do.
I made the switch because I was given an amazing opportunity and I just went for it. It was the best decision I’ve made in my career.
Since then, I’ve also dabbled in a bit of Ruby on Rails as that’s our backend where I currently work.
I wrote about it here.
Take chances and standout
Nick Taylor (he/him) ・ Jan 7 ・ 5 min read
That's awesome! I feel like it's easy to get caught up in thinking that you can't switch without a large amount of experience to back it up. I've noticed that companies I've inquired with are still pretty receptive despite my primary stack being dissimilar to theirs. I guess the worst that comes from taking a chance is you learn something 😄
I haven't ever made a major switch, but all my internships were data oriented so I did a lot of Python and SQL.
Moving into web development wasn't terribly hard, but it took me a long time to understand the entire process. Working inside of a framework (Rails), I think actually made it a little more difficult for me to learn.
I wonder if Express would have been easier to start with since it abstracts less.
I'd agree with your point about working inside a framework. I've feel like I've traded a lot of knowledge opportunities for the magic that Spring Boot affords.
I'm sure a different start would have helped too, Java to me has that enterprise feel to it and that's not a long term track I want to be on.