How have things changed... Lots and at the same time not so much. That isn't really a helpful answer. When I started was basically right after the PC revolution and just before the internet 1.0 really took off. Development had shifted from large mainframe development to taking advantage of PC's power, so there was a big emphasis on 2 tier type solutions. With the internet bubble things shifted from 2 tier and fat clients to 3 tier and web clients/thin clients. Following that was an emphasis on doing Service Oriented Architectures which are kind of the pre-cursor to today's cloud computing distributed/micro-service architectures. Its kind of funny because it feels like the pendulum is swinging back towards fat clients first with the rise of Javascript frameworks, mobile applications, and extrapolating that to things like web assembly and edge computing. Well maybe not fat clients in the traditional sense but moving computation closer to the user or device and away from the services.
As far as keeping current I think you are probably already on the right track by listening to SWE Daily and being a part of communities like this one. Apart from that in my professional life I look for opportunities to incorporate new technology and try new things while still accomplishing the goals of the business. If that doesn't fill your appetite I recommend having a side project to work on that allows for more green-field development and experimentation.
In general you have to figure out what are the things that really interest you and stay current on those at a deep level, while having an idea of what else is going on in the industry at a higher level of abstraction. I feel that will keep you flexible enough to be able to solve a wide variety of problems.
In your specific case of JQuery I wouldn't worry too much as I am sure there is still a lot of JQuery out there to be worked on. Some industries are still running Fortran code written in the 70s and 80s. Do I want to work on those systems... well no. My advice here is simple. Don't get good at the things you don't want to do. It's like every time someone gives me a Perl endorsement on LinkedIn I wish they wouldn't have. (Perl is fine if that is what you want to do, I just don't personally enjoy developing in that environment, but then again I haven't used it since the late 90's).
With so many new frameworks and methods popping up every day the hard part is figuring out which ones are worth learning and which don't have a good life span. So I basically take a wait and see attitude while new technologies gather some critical mass before I jump in.
Creative, Curious Maker, I have 10 years in Tech, and I am a Software Developer at a mid-sized enterprise. Hardworking and collaborative, likes to help others. Hit me up!
John,
How have things changed... Lots and at the same time not so much. That isn't really a helpful answer. When I started was basically right after the PC revolution and just before the internet 1.0 really took off. Development had shifted from large mainframe development to taking advantage of PC's power, so there was a big emphasis on 2 tier type solutions. With the internet bubble things shifted from 2 tier and fat clients to 3 tier and web clients/thin clients. Following that was an emphasis on doing Service Oriented Architectures which are kind of the pre-cursor to today's cloud computing distributed/micro-service architectures. Its kind of funny because it feels like the pendulum is swinging back towards fat clients first with the rise of Javascript frameworks, mobile applications, and extrapolating that to things like web assembly and edge computing. Well maybe not fat clients in the traditional sense but moving computation closer to the user or device and away from the services.
As far as keeping current I think you are probably already on the right track by listening to SWE Daily and being a part of communities like this one. Apart from that in my professional life I look for opportunities to incorporate new technology and try new things while still accomplishing the goals of the business. If that doesn't fill your appetite I recommend having a side project to work on that allows for more green-field development and experimentation.
In general you have to figure out what are the things that really interest you and stay current on those at a deep level, while having an idea of what else is going on in the industry at a higher level of abstraction. I feel that will keep you flexible enough to be able to solve a wide variety of problems.
In your specific case of JQuery I wouldn't worry too much as I am sure there is still a lot of JQuery out there to be worked on. Some industries are still running Fortran code written in the 70s and 80s. Do I want to work on those systems... well no. My advice here is simple. Don't get good at the things you don't want to do. It's like every time someone gives me a Perl endorsement on LinkedIn I wish they wouldn't have. (Perl is fine if that is what you want to do, I just don't personally enjoy developing in that environment, but then again I haven't used it since the late 90's).
With so many new frameworks and methods popping up every day the hard part is figuring out which ones are worth learning and which don't have a good life span. So I basically take a wait and see attitude while new technologies gather some critical mass before I jump in.
Hopefully this helps.
-Harley
Thanks for all the great details! So many gems of truth here.