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Is it a good idea to take jobs using different stacks and tech? I know that in our profession, we have to be able to keep up with the new technologies and are always learning, but how much is too much?
As a new Web Developer, I have a foundation now in the ASP.NET and general .NET stack. Personally, I love working with ASP.NET and Microsoft technologies, and I don't mind expanding my knowledge on front-end frameworks such as Angular and vanilla JS/jQuery to be used within my MVC applications.
However, it is also said (and I agree) that the languages and frameworks are just tools, and a programmer is a programmer; although we can (and probably should) specialize. Nearly every time I meet someone, they want me to work on their website which is using a different technology.
The problem this is kind of causing is that I'm spending so much time learning all of these different random frameworks such as Angular, React, WordPress (not a framework, but still its a separate skill)/PHP, etc... ANd not enough time ACTUALLY CODING.
I have 2 schools of thought on this:
1. Turn down everything that doesn't involve ASP.NET/C#/MS Stack, which is my current forte/what I enjoy working with.
2. Try to keep learning things such as WordPress simply because it is in high demand, and hope that I can somehow be a "jack of all trades."
The thing is, I don't really want to be a jack of all trades; I want to be that guy that knows ASP.NET/.NET CORE (eventually) so well that I am well-known in my area as a developer/consultant. HOWEVER, right now, I'm not some super experienced ASP.NET vet and it is easier to try and pick up jobs here and there by expanding the stacks I'm willing to work with.
For example, I got on a project recently where I'm going to eventually use ASP.NET MVC for the back-end but right now, they have a Wordpress site and they want me to do some work on their current site in the short-term. So now I gotta stop working on my other MVC/JavaScript projects and go learn more about Wordpress templates and stuff.
Any guidance on this would be appreciated. I love learning, but I don't want to be just a learner, I want to be a doer. Plus, customers have no idea what all this means, they just want a working website and don't get why you can't fix it for them right away.
modified 8-Sep-16 19:38pm.
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TheOnlyRealTodd wrote: but I don't want to be just a learner, I want to be a doer.
Frankly, it's impossible nowadays to separate the two, you have to figure out a good balance, which typically means at first learning only the essential minimum, then expanding slowly.
The advantage of knowing various platforms and languages is that you can learn the best practices from each, and b*tch about the kruft.  Overall though, some very common best practices start emerging, like writing small functions, what good documentation for the team really means, what useful unit tests really are, and even meta-skills like project planning and estimation, working with "technicolor" personalities, etc.
So really, IMHO, the skill is in finding that balance between learning and doing, which takes accumulating experience.
Marc
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Take it from someone who has specialised, WPF and LOB solutions. Don't do it if you want to be in the developer game long term. Once you stop shoving new tech in the top of the funnel it all dries up.
The sage advice from Mr Clifton, who AFAICT has a handle on more tech than most, about a balance is critical. You can't learn everything, pick and choose the ones that interest you or going to give you the best ROI.
And unless you are short of work do not take every project that turns up. Your rep will be enhanced by doing an excellent job on a few projects rather than a whole raft of different projects.
Never underestimate the power of human stupidity
RAH
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TheOnlyRealTodd wrote: hope that I can somehow be a "jack of all trades
According to recent news articles, a lot of which have been featured in CP's Insider News, the industry is pressing hard to find full-stack web developers who have a working knowledge of everything. You can still have a focus in one area but it really pays dividends to know how the file bytes on a content database server hard disk become this very text on your screen and all the little hoops it has to jump through to get there, and there are a lot of them. It's my own personal opinion to learn the fundamentals of it all but concentrate on a specific web stack. I myself like what I can build in MVC/Razor with a SQL Server backend but I will never stop cursing at IIS. You find what you like and stick with it. You don't have to know it all but it helps to know just enough to easily rediscover it with a few keywords and Google.
if (Object.DividedByZero == true) { Universe.Implode(); }
Meus ratio ex fortis machina. Simplicitatis de formae ac munus. -Foothill, 2016
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IIS is rather crazy.
Just out of curiosity, what would you think of Apache + mod_mono on Win32? (I did a port of mod_mono to windows based on a patch I found for an older version, and got it working right off the bat. I am rather proud of that).
What do you get when you cross a joke with a rhetorical question?
The metaphorical solid rear-end expulsions have impacted the metaphorical motorized bladed rotating air movement mechanism.
Do questions with multiple question marks annoy you???
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Being that my professional experience with Apache is superficial, I couldn't answer that one. I know that Apache will run on a Windows server but I can't say that a web app will run any better if it was built with ASP.Net/IIS (all my shops have been MS shops). All of them have their strengths and weaknesses. When it comes down to it, it's really about personal preference and what will get the job done. Sure, you could build an entire website in a week using Bootstrap or a CMS like WordPress or DotNetNuke. They do their job well but, as a developer, you will never understand the intricacies of TCP/IP, HTTP/CSS, and the framework of the month unless you build a few of them from scratch.
if (Object.DividedByZero == true) { Universe.Implode(); }
Meus ratio ex fortis machina. Simplicitatis de formae ac munus. -Foothill, 2016
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Yet I've hardly ever had a problem with IIS Express.
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law. - Liber AL vel Legis 1:40, Aleister Crowley
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IIS Express does seem to be more stable than full-blown IIS.
A bit odd, eh?
What do you get when you cross a joke with a rhetorical question?
The metaphorical solid rear-end expulsions have impacted the metaphorical motorized bladed rotating air movement mechanism.
Do questions with multiple question marks annoy you???
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You can stick to asp.net and still have a load of new things to learn. Granted new server frameworks and tools don't come out as often as front-end ones seem to do, but there is still a lot of things you can get stuck into, from Entity Framework to building service-based systems in WCF, leveraging MSMQ for robust asynchronous communications and so on.
At the end of the day if you have to branch out to make enough money to live then I suppose that's what you gotta do, but the downside is that you do become a Jack of all trades but you already know this.
Personally, I don't do any work that isn't within my skill-set domain but there is enough of it out there that I can afford to do so.
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I've just been lumbered with making some changes using appcellerator for IOS apps.
As a full stack asp.net/winforms dev its too much out my comfort zone for me, I'm looking elsewhere for sure now.
Not that I'm adverse to using different technology. My last role involved .net and php solutions.
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TheOnlyRealTodd wrote: I know that in our profession, we have to be able to keep up with the new technologies and are always learning, but how much is too much?
Unfortunately, in our profession, there's something like a language-of-the-day. Most go the way of the Dodo.
There's one aspect - learning the logic of programming so that problem solving is almost on an instinctive level. In this aspect, a large tool set, even within a given language, will not serve you as well as being extremely proficient with a smaller tool set. You expand your tool set based on curiosity and occasional imperatives. A framework, although making the coding faster, may isolate you from what you are really doing. A double-edged sword, as is much in life.
OK - that's the ideal situation.
Now, enter the real world - where silly things like eating and sleeping indoors (at least when it snows) is a relevant part of the decision making process. Suddenly there's a need for proficiency in the latest and greatest. In some ways, this is an oxymoron as since it's the latest and greatest, except for the creator of the language/framework there is no expertise. Maybe this is the driving force as to why languages come and go so often.
But they make the recruiters happy - and ill-informed managers who send specs to HR weep with joy in thinking the latest and greatest will cure their ills.
So - all I can warn against is not to become a Jack^ss of all trades and master of none*.
Dance accordingly
* I'm tired of fixing their broken code
| Ravings en masse^ |
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| "The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits." - Albert Einstein | | "If you are searching for perfection in others, then you seek disappointment. If you are seek perfection in yourself, then you will find failure." - Balboos HaGadol Mar 2010 |
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TheOnlyRealTodd wrote: Plus, customers have no idea what all this means, they just want a working website and don't get why you can't fix it for them right away.
I was mulling over this last night and woke up with this realization which I knew, but its so ingrained in me it wasn't at a conscious level yesterday:
The customer is irrelevant. What's relevant is your next job, the next customer, and the next recruiter or word-of-mouth friend that gets you your next job. So what blog about what you learn, create small demo projects on GitHub demoing your knowledge, write articles if you want, promote yourself on LinkedIn and Facebook. (Obviously don't do anything that compromises the IP of your current / past employers.)
Because that's what people are going to be looking at when you're looking for your next gig.
Marc
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Your current project sounds decent; you are keeping your .NET skills fresh while learning something new. I don't think you have to turn down everything not .NET related. This assumes that people are sane and won't think that your .NET skills have disappeared because you were working on a Wordpress focused project for a few months.
It might also be useful to think about new skills beyond how they'll help you land your next job. From what I've seen, the Wordpress plugin landscape is woefully underserved by good developers. And there are some pretty bad plugins making a lot of money. By paying attention to what people are asking for (and what they're complaining about), you could find yourself in a position to create a great plugin that's successful enough that you wouldn't need anyone to hire you for anything, ever. And if people are paying you to work on projects that develop your Wordpress skills enough to get you to this point, that's even better. Doesn't hurt to think big! 
As an aside, a large portion of our industry has a problem with focusing on very narrow skill sets and ignoring the things that matter. At a previous job, where I was involved in interviewing, some of my fellow co-workers reacted very negatively to anyone whose background was mostly Java (most of our code was in C#). If you're hiring a short term contractor to solve a very specific problem, but not so much when hiring someone long term. I'd always argue that someone with experience developing complex Java apps that solve tough problems will benefit the team a lot more than someone with experience working on trivial .NET apps. In the cases where we hired such people, the argument proved true: lack of .NET/C# experience slowed them down for the first week or two, but their experience building and scaling complex applications more than made up for it over the ensuing months and years.
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You raise valid points here. I was thinking that too: I actually do enjoy PHP a lot and I feel like especially the new version, has a lot of untapped potential. Also, coming from a .NET standpoint, it would be fun to bring some of the more advanced features that I learned in .NET to the PHP world for people as well. At the end of the day, PHP can't really go anywhere with WordPress being as big as it is, which is awesome.
However, I know that there are an awful low of hackjob-ists out there who use PHP, but that doesn't NEED to be the case. Truthfully, I'm probably going to end up specializing in WordPress plugins and .NET backend tech; and I don't feel like they are too out of reach from eachother to be calling that a jack of all trades.
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Apple woke up their lead designer in the middle of the night to ask him about ideas for the new iPhone. The disgruntled designer told them "Jack off". The marketing department found the idea fantastic.
Source : Reddit.
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Nish Nishant wrote: The disgruntled designer told them "Jack off".
Imagine the awesome product they would have come up with if he used the !KSS term. 
Marc
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It would have had a Hell of a vibration!
GCS d--- s-/++ a- C++++ U+++ P- L- E-- W++ N++ o+ K- w+++ O? M-- V? PS+ PE- Y+ PGP t++ 5? X R++ tv-- b+ DI+++ D++ G e++>+++ h--- ++>+++ y+++* Weapons extension: ma- k++ F+2 X
If you think 'goto' is evil, try writing an Assembly program without JMP. -- TNCaver
When I was six, there were no ones and zeroes - only zeroes. And not all of them worked. -- Ravi Bhavnani
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Oh, don't talk to me about phones vibrating!
Mobile phones were perfectly good boys' toys until some idiot decided to include a vibrator in them!
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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Many many boys like those kind of vibrations, in one way or another!
Also, it is sad that they could reduce the size of external plugs without complaints by male users - it would explain the focus on vibrations though.
I'm treading VERY near to Soapbox material 
GCS d--- s-/++ a- C++++ U+++ P- L- E-- W++ N++ o+ K- w+++ O? M-- V? PS+ PE- Y+ PGP t++ 5? X R++ tv-- b+ DI+++ D++ G e++>+++ h--- ++>+++ y+++* Weapons extension: ma- k++ F+2 X
If you think 'goto' is evil, try writing an Assembly program without JMP. -- TNCaver
When I was six, there were no ones and zeroes - only zeroes. And not all of them worked. -- Ravi Bhavnani
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The Beach Boys even wrote a song about it, didn't they?
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If some men woke me up while I was lying in bed the last thing I would want them to do is "Jack off".
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So I avoided getting into an argument with the CTO about the performance of table joins. The nice thing about communication channels like Slack is that you simply don't need to reply.
His contention is that table joins are "hugely expensive", particularly for reporting. My contention is of course that a well designed database will not have this issue.
I came across this[^] interesting discussion.
But the bottom line is, I wonder why he has this attitude, particularly when his reports are dog slow, and the page request to the server times out if you ask for a report that spans more than a day (maybe a week.) Looking at the code, no wonder, because the reports seem to be generated almost entirely in Python, without leveraging table joins on the server itself at all!
Granted, there are certainly times when a very specialized report might benefit from denormalization, but for Pete's sake, these are basic transaction detail and transaction total queries.
There are so many things I disagree with the CTO about. I must have reached some level of emotional maturity before taking this job because I'm able to not get into an argument, I just say "whatever, dude" and move along.
Marc
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To play devil's advocate, learning how the database engine and query optimizer work can be daunting to those who have never coded or haven't had to code in years/decades such as your run of the mill CTO. Like a lot of developers that I have known, they do not realize the huge performance impact of improper table design, like making the primary key a string or Guid.
if (Object.DividedByZero == true) { Universe.Implode(); }
Meus ratio ex fortis machina. Simplicitatis de formae ac munus. -Foothill, 2016
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"Ohhhh! Guid == 'Good'! Let's use it!"
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