2024 - Web Dev People - what tools do you AND your clients love using?
April 4, 2024 4:25 AM Subscribe
I'm a web/app developer moving freelance (though keeping door open to permanent positions as well) just under 3 years after a career change. I have pretty strong fundamentals in JS (React, Vue), PHP (Laravel) and SQL (Postgres), but I feel in the current market some more specific / specialised tool / platform skills would help me stand out and put myself forward for more diverse / interesting / better paid opportunities. Ideas?
I have the good luck to have potentially most of the rest of the year with a decent chunk of time to dedicate to learning / reinforcing skills. I've been working a lot so far on getting more fluent in Typescript and more advanced in React.
The problem right now is that (certainly here in the French / Europe + UK remote job market) almost everything that a couple of years back was listed as needing 2/3 years experience now lists as needing 5+. I know a big part of this is just to reduce the crazy load on HR getting hundred of applicants for each job, and I should still try my luck as confidently as possible, but it does feel like its hard to get past those initial date-of-getting-in-the-game filters.
This is where I guess that having some more specific tech competences on offer might help... examples that I already have some experience in would be Squarespace (low-code site builder) and Botpress (chatbot platform) and examples that I've dabbled in would be Contentful (headless CMS) and n8n (automation platform).
Do any mefites have experience in making these sorts of tools a core part of their work?
What other tools or platforms are there out there that are in demand and at least not horrendous to work with as a solo / remote / temporary developer?
Greyhairs of code (I'm one of them, just not yet in the seen-it-all-cycle-around-before sense), what sort of experience / skills would make an enthusiastic junior gunning for an optimistically challenging job stand out to you these days?
I have the good luck to have potentially most of the rest of the year with a decent chunk of time to dedicate to learning / reinforcing skills. I've been working a lot so far on getting more fluent in Typescript and more advanced in React.
The problem right now is that (certainly here in the French / Europe + UK remote job market) almost everything that a couple of years back was listed as needing 2/3 years experience now lists as needing 5+. I know a big part of this is just to reduce the crazy load on HR getting hundred of applicants for each job, and I should still try my luck as confidently as possible, but it does feel like its hard to get past those initial date-of-getting-in-the-game filters.
This is where I guess that having some more specific tech competences on offer might help... examples that I already have some experience in would be Squarespace (low-code site builder) and Botpress (chatbot platform) and examples that I've dabbled in would be Contentful (headless CMS) and n8n (automation platform).
Do any mefites have experience in making these sorts of tools a core part of their work?
What other tools or platforms are there out there that are in demand and at least not horrendous to work with as a solo / remote / temporary developer?
Greyhairs of code (I'm one of them, just not yet in the seen-it-all-cycle-around-before sense), what sort of experience / skills would make an enthusiastic junior gunning for an optimistically challenging job stand out to you these days?
+1 to the Docker suggestion above
I can't really advise about the CMS world, as my career is more in making web apps that act like software, but I would recommend getting really knowledgeable in at least one "front end" tech and one "back end" tech. At my previous job, that was React (TypeScript) + Scala. At my current job, that's React (TypeScript) + Kotlin. I wouldn't spend time sampling the buffet of Vue, NextJS, React, Angular, etc. Just get good at one of them (and my recommendation is to get good at React, specifically).
Like you, I am also a career changer. My journey began closer to 2012, and the ultimately included a bootcamp and a CS degree. I spent years trying to fill up my resume with a collection of technologies that I hoped would appeal to employers, mostly Wordpress Plugins and simple standalone websites.
I am a little amazed at my own naivete now - the codebases I've worked in professionally are several orders of magnitude more complex than anything I could have created on my own, and I was severely overvaluing specific technologies. I should have been valuing patterns (grinding Leetcode helped me survive interviews) and design (still working on this one, but "how it all connects together, and why" is the overarching theme of my professional life and is completely unrelated to any particular language).
About a year ago I was chatting with my manager (also a software engineer) about interns and the hiring market and how big the gap between "what I learned in school" and "what I need to know for this job" is. He had an insight that surprised me - he told me the thing he wishes he saw on candidate resumes, more than any particular technology, was a contribution to an open source project. Demonstrating that you can code something for an existing codebase and get it merged is the closest approximation to professional work available to someone trying to break in. I have no idea if this is actually an effective tactic, but I must admit - it would impress me, too.
Good luck out there.
posted by paris moon at 8:49 AM on April 4 [3 favorites]
I can't really advise about the CMS world, as my career is more in making web apps that act like software, but I would recommend getting really knowledgeable in at least one "front end" tech and one "back end" tech. At my previous job, that was React (TypeScript) + Scala. At my current job, that's React (TypeScript) + Kotlin. I wouldn't spend time sampling the buffet of Vue, NextJS, React, Angular, etc. Just get good at one of them (and my recommendation is to get good at React, specifically).
Like you, I am also a career changer. My journey began closer to 2012, and the ultimately included a bootcamp and a CS degree. I spent years trying to fill up my resume with a collection of technologies that I hoped would appeal to employers, mostly Wordpress Plugins and simple standalone websites.
I am a little amazed at my own naivete now - the codebases I've worked in professionally are several orders of magnitude more complex than anything I could have created on my own, and I was severely overvaluing specific technologies. I should have been valuing patterns (grinding Leetcode helped me survive interviews) and design (still working on this one, but "how it all connects together, and why" is the overarching theme of my professional life and is completely unrelated to any particular language).
About a year ago I was chatting with my manager (also a software engineer) about interns and the hiring market and how big the gap between "what I learned in school" and "what I need to know for this job" is. He had an insight that surprised me - he told me the thing he wishes he saw on candidate resumes, more than any particular technology, was a contribution to an open source project. Demonstrating that you can code something for an existing codebase and get it merged is the closest approximation to professional work available to someone trying to break in. I have no idea if this is actually an effective tactic, but I must admit - it would impress me, too.
Good luck out there.
posted by paris moon at 8:49 AM on April 4 [3 favorites]
Tailwind? Next/Nuxt? I think tacking on experience standing up a AI api integration with Huggingface or Replicate can’t hurt.
posted by jasondigitized at 6:29 PM on April 4
posted by jasondigitized at 6:29 PM on April 4
Yeah, I would second Tailwind as well as some of the CSS-in-JS stuff that I’ve seen happening out there. Oh and “serverless” architecture.
posted by johngoren at 3:59 AM on April 5
posted by johngoren at 3:59 AM on April 5
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posted by johngoren at 4:57 AM on April 4 [1 favorite]