Defining Your Developer Bounds

While I was casually surfing twitter in my spare time today, I came across this rather poignant tweet:

I couldn’t agree more Jem. Far too frequently new developers are pigeon-holed into a framework, library or similar with little to no knowledge of the language as a whole.

In fact, on most job sites across the world, frontend developers are required to have experience with a specific framework to be eligible to apply, which just sounds like a great way to pigeon-hole a person even more:

“Oh, great you know some AngularJS; our client works with that!”

“What do you mean, you only know AngularJS? React XXMCVII is all the rage these days”

Perhaps a slight exaggeration, but the point still stands — developers that focus on a single library, or framework are setting themselves up for a short term career that might only last them a single job.

So, “Whats to be done?” I hear you clamour? Well — first of all, escape the mindset that knowledge of a particular framework is going to land you that dream job — it might, but there’s also nothing to be said about that job in ten years time and what it will be like.

Probably the biggest point:

Every. Single. Framework that you work on is built with vanilla-js. If you don’t know how to write a loop without invoking angular.forEach or are a little confused when talking about Object proxies, and getter/setter pairings, then these are all things that you should read up on, posthaste.

I can’t stress this enough. If you’re really set on being a long term developer, don’t introduce yourself as “The Angular Guy”, or “React Man”, call yourself a Frontend Engineer. It’s fine to be involved with Angular, React, Angular2, Angular3, Angular4, Angular5, Angular81237123, by all means, they create a good development environment, but you’ll run in to issues when these frameworks go the way of jQuery .

Yeah, remember? $ ? Not that long ago, if you were a jQuery developer, you were the man. Able to select elements in a single bound, call backend api endpoints with the greatest of ease. Now? Well, you’re a washed up dev with a wealth of experience in a framework that (let’s be honest) has all but died.

I think it’s pertinent at this point to shoot down the idea that “Oh, when the next big thing comes out, I’ll just learn that.” Well — yeah, you can do that, but you’ll always be jumping to the next framework with the previous one’s concepts and mentality in the forefront of your mind.

Imagine being able to approach every problem domain that you come across totally unopinionated, without any notion of “Well, I guess I’ll solve this in Angular” just “Huh, that’s an interesting issue, I wonder what tools I can use to solve this”

From experience working with junior devs and people that are learning to code. People that hire people are looking for people with that mentality.

I think that the point of this post was to make you reconsider what it means to be a developer, does it mean that you have your small domain of frameworks and libraries that you know inside and out? Or do you consider yourself to be someone that understands that libraries and frameworks are just tools at your disposal to solve an issue if they fit into the puzzle well enough.

Disappointingly, so often frameworks are chosen and ran with simply from popularity. Which, I’ll admit has some distinct advantages: A wealth of knowledge on StackOverflow, healthy dev communities surrounding them etc. But — I can’t help but feel that frameworks should be a sort of “last resort” to use when you know that the code it would take to solve the issue is going to suffer as a result of not implementing a framework.

So — go out into the big wide world, learn yourself some VanillaJS & be at peace with your inner engineer.

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