Why specialty hurts new developers

abdessamad-zgor — Thu, 11 Apr 2024 02:03:32 +0000

To be honest I have struggled with this concept when I first encountered it in Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World by David Epstein but I remembered that the only reason I started software development is because I really liked math and searching scholarly books and texts, In this book it is shown through evidence and various case studies from athletes to musicians, artists and even scientists that a person with varied interests and pursuits has a better chance of excelling in a certain field because of those varied interests. and I think these same parallels can be found in the software engineering realm, given that the de facto career advice for starting developers is to focus on one technology or field and work on it deeply with companies stressing the need for a an X number of years as a proof of competence, of course, If it's not broken don't fix it, people still make great software (arguably) and the whole global economy depends on modern technology made usable by software made by engineers that are specialist, but that doesn't mean that generalists aren't as able to solve the same problems and in even come up with better solutions.
So long story short, in your first years as a developer sample as many fields within software development it is proven that it helps in the long term.

Why JavaScript is not a great gateway language

abdessamad-zgor — Sun, 07 Jan 2024 15:03:09 +0000

Marijuana done did a 180 in the last 50 years in terms of public opinion from being cited in Reagan's "War on drugs" speech as a dangerous drug to it being legalized in Colorado and Washington in 2012, for those who know about this plant's previous reputation know it was largely considered a gateway drug (as in the first drug try before getting into more serious drugs) and JavaScript is just* about the same.
Learning JavaScript is not going to give you an understanding on the broader realm of programming languages and computer science, it's just gonna make you highly qualified in googling for errors and remembering popular library API's, at least this is the case for me personally. JavaScript has failed and I know I am not alone because npm packages still getting published and the wheel of faith continues along it's path.

Nevertheless I shall turn the other cheek and thank this language for making me understand how hard it is to actually build software and how exhilarating it can be when you finally crack it. Given that, I would like to emphasize the utter fuckery of prototypal inheritance, the this keyword, undefined, stupid syntax errors and all the Es's, no matter how cute (ES6) or who their daddy is (Typescript), when a programming language has this much to learn about and practice it detaches itself from it's true objective, being efficient and understandable, it's not novelty when it's too much for so little. It's just some other bullshit one needs to do to keep their job، well I might not actually know what I am talking about only 3 years in, but every time I look at Eslint warning I feel my stomach turning so I will just use ReScript or Elm, and fuck SEO or I'll even switch to PHP, who knows what I will do, just a noob JS developer trying to figure out what lies beyond the wall.
I encourage others to do the same because life is too short to spend any of it using and relying only on JavaScript or it's little succubus frameworks and tools.

But I still recommend it for back end.

DEV Community: abdessamad-zgor

Why specialty hurts new developers

Why JavaScript is not a great gateway language