A little background: Through my teens in the 90’s I did a lot of the things you may expect. I was a script kiddie on mIRC, made a tank game in Unreal Engine, and did some Quake modding. From 2002-2004 I landed a job doing Java web dev, SQL, and overall database administration because my father’s friend needed someone that could do that. I was ok at the job, but not great. Being young, my hobby that turned into a 9-5 made me want to stab my eyes out and I quit.

With that said, I can understand a lot of what’s going on, but it doesn’t “click” anymore. I spent 20 years as a career machinist, but I physically can’t do that anymore. Here’s the rub - my twin brother is a brittle diabetic and can’t work (lots of other stuff going on as well), and our mother is getting old (father passed this year). The only reasonable way forward that I can see in order to be able to support my brother is trying to get back into development.

When I stopped, subversion was what we used. I’m trying to understand Git, but it’s a giant conceptual leap. I guess, what I’d like to hear from you all is a way to jump back in as quickly as possible in such a way that it may be a career.

Thanks

  • vzq@lemmy.blahaj.zone
    5·
    4 months ago

    All the cool kids right now are mostly on JavaScript/type script. It’s probably a good place to get started since you’ll need it on the front end.

    I’m guessing most work on the U.S. side is react. You can probably pick up a bit of node/react native as you go for the backend and for native dev.

    Java is the new COBOL. Big corps luuuuuuuuurve it. It’s not what I would expect a single dev to use. C# is similar but smaller, if you forget unity game dev. And you should forget unity game dev.

    Rust is basically a less bad C. If you do things you used to do in C, learn rust. If not, don’t.

    Python is also still a thing. If you like it you can probably use it for most things, but if not there are other options.

      • vzq@lemmy.blahaj.zone
        3·
        4 months ago

        I like Vue better than react tbh.

        My latest project is alpine.js. It’s not bad, it stays out of the way.

        That said, I don’t do front end often enough to keep up.

        • ravhall
          2·
          4 months ago

          Mixing js and template like react does with jsx has always rubbed me wrong. I like how Vue separates everything.

          {!found && <p>Not Found</p>} 😕

          <p v-if=“!found”>Not Found</p> 🙂

          • vzq@lemmy.blahaj.zone
            1·
            4 months ago

            Yes!

            But I’ve learned that there are A LOT of people that are incredibly pritective of react, so I generally don’t wade out into that particular debate.

            • ravhall
              2·
              4 months ago

              I think for me it is because my background is in the web first, as opposed to having gone to school for general computer science and then entered web apps second. The idea of returning blocks of HTML with JSX makes more sense to them.