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Catching the Technology Train, After I’d Disembarked

12 Jun

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Staying away from programming for too long, things change faster than I’d ever expected. Even with a strong foundation, when things move ahead so quickly, too many things change and it isn’t as easy to hop back on the train, as I would have thought. Today, I am trying to catch up with technology train that is web development. How did I become so disconnected?

  1. My initial disinterest was that I wasn’t very interested. With web “development,” writing text-markup was not “programming” (it still isn’t). It has taken a couple of decades for web-programming to require the skills of true developers. But it is here, today. In the mean time, I’d left it behind and as a result, it left me behind.
  2. When I recently started looking at getting into web-development, the landscape was changing and evolving so quickly that it was hard to pin down which of the dozens of technologies to focus on. If I’d picked Perl, ColdFusion, Ruby, AngularJS, etc.… ”the list is endless” I’d be an expert in another obsolete technology. However, avoiding a pick, meant that I did not get my hands dirty and did not stay keen about the evolving landscape of web-development.
  3. What I never expected is that it isn’t just the languages and frameworks which have changed, it is also the technology infrastructure which has changed and, notably, this has changed development workflow.

The result is that, not only do I need to learn new languages and their nuances, I even need to learn a new workflow, a new way of doing programming. While I am not starting from scratch, a lot of my prior “expertise” is not directly applicable; so it feels like starting from scratch.

I could just stick to the old technologies that I am still expert at, but that isn’t cutting edge. Still I could do that. Then I wouldn’t have anything to be stressed about. And, that wouldn’t be so bad, now would it?

 
 
 
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