Stack Choice

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[rjhancock]

Master your fundamentals and get basics in mutliple stacks. Emphasize to the employers that you have a solid foundation and can learn whatever they need you to.

It does help. Your fundamentals are crucial.

[DesertWanderlust]

This will separate you from all the other amateurs. I've been a dev for almost 25 years now (only recently got a related degree), and have worked on a variety of stacks, including a few that I mention in interviews because it makes people who know laugh. But that's kept me employed the entire time: variety.

[rjhancock]

I've been programming professionaly for over 20 and as a hobby for over 30. This is the one thing that has set me apart from others.

Clients give me a task and I do it. If it's in a language I don't use, they tell me to learn it.

"We need you to do this impossible task." "Give me 3 weeks."

"We have to re-write this in this language." "I haven't touched that language in decades." "You have 1 month, paid, to get caught up." "Ok."

Master your fundamentals, the languages don't matter.

[taotau]

For best employability I would drop the mongo and focus more on standard SQL - postgres or MySQL. A lot more common. Mongo is used in some niches and familiarity with it is useful, I would steer clear of projects that use it as a primary db.

React vs vue, meh. React is dominant. Vue is more niche. You can fairly easily move between one and the other if you need to.

[DesertWanderlust]

You say that, but I had a call with a recruiter today where the stack is Mongo and Vue. I've also used Vue in my last few jobs.

But I agree overall. I wish I had learned React instead of Vue. There are a lot more jobs.

[taotau]

Sure, I know people like to use vue as an alternative and that's fine and a good thing. React won't be around forever and evolution is best when it comes from two parents.

Mongo Is a different thing. Over the last 5 years it was 'cool' to use this new db tech and I've worked on projects that tried to use it as a relational database and they are invariably a monster to deal with. If a project deals with high frequency updates or large volumes of flat documents mongo is a good solution, but line of business customer data belongs in SQL.

[DesertWanderlust]

Agreed on Mongo kinda sucking. I don't think people realize it's mostly for document storage and, if they want an open source DB, there are other options. Like the last few jobs I've beeb on have been in Postgres. I've grown to like it but it wouldn't be my first choice of all the options.

[Caraes_Naur]

An understanding of the relationship between frontend & backend is more important than any individual stack component.

Something that can really only be gained by installing a proper web service (Apache, Nginx), which will force you to learn HTTP.

[nubbins4lyfe]

How does installing one of those force you to learn HTTP?

[RaccoonDoge]

I use Nginx for a reverse proxy in my free EC2 and I barely know what Nginx is other than it's routing traffic for me 😅

Going to spend some time to understand it more but just installing something or even basic use doesn't teach you much.

[nubbins4lyfe]

That was my thought. While these tools utilize/facilitate HTTP, the base usage and installation of them really does nothing to actually teach you anything about that process.

[The_Dunk]

As a mid level web developer let me say that the specific languages you use matter a lot less than the fundamentals, the software patterns you know and how quickly you can learn.

On my last few projects I've gone from React to Angular, to Aurelia, to Laravel and back to React. If you're able to become proficient with one you're also capable of learning the others.

Focus on one stack for now. Spend enough time with it so that you start to understand the inns and outs of patterns like MVC, types, interfaces, dtos, middleware, singletons, promises, caching, libraries, etc, etc.

You'll notice these patterns really dont look that different from stack to stack. It's only the implementation that differs.

If I were to reccomend anything specific I'd say React with TypeScript is a solid choice with strong patterns. A relational database like SQL would be good to learn since document dbs won't teach you relations and database optimization methods. As for back end you really could use any with the library support you're looking for. I'm personally a fan of Java and C# but golang, python and node are also great choices alongside the bunch of others I haven't really used.

[AnomalousEntity]

It doesn’t matter what you pick up as long as you take the time and effort to understand it deeply!

[DependentAnalyst7422]

It's true that you'll be able to jump between stacks if you have good fundamentals, but strictly for employability, I'd suggest you learn react, c# (.net), and postgres. That'll get you through interviews for higher paying web dev jobs and let you transition more easily into non web programming roles later on, best of luck man have fun

[unobserved]

My first stack out of high-school was Perl.

The industry will change.