Hello 2020

Well it’s official. I have been a web developer for 16 years. I started with HTML and CSS like everyone else and moved into PHP, .Net and Rails. The last year I’ve focused primarily on WordPress development. I’ve worked in a number of industries from Real Estate, Food and even Solar. One thing I’ve noticed is that I’ve never worked with a technology where the jobs have dried up. You know the type of crap like is xyz technology dead and etc. Once I completely quit all social networks I have completely removed opinions for the sake of clicks out of my life. What keeps me in this industry is not the specific code I write or designs I create it’s the fact that I love helping, fixing and creating things. The core of me is someone who gets a tiny rush when I see/hear the reaction of my work. The wow that looks nice or man that really helped us.

Every year I tend to focus on a technology. 2019 I focused heavily on WordPress. I mean really looking at the Codex and doing things with WordPress I didn’t know it could do. 2020 hopefully is the year of WebAssembly or WASM. While I’ve done projects with Vue, React and Angular I’m still doing a ton of JQuery work. People ask me all the time why don’t you just switch to Vue or the javascript front-end framework of the week. That’s because of one really hard lesson I learned a while back. The articles, books and Youtube videos that recommend a certain NEW technology do not reflect the job market. Web Developers are reinventing the wheel and making things more complicated to sell you something. There’s a ton of money in creating a Framework everyone uses. It’s also a really good way of justifying a high salary. “Ah man I have to keep learning something new, wah wah”. “React keeps changing xyz, wah wah”. I’m really excited about WASM because Javascript everywhere didn’t work. It’s great for certain things but lets be honest it’s a mess. But using the save server-side language on the client is a better proposition as long as you can package it and upload it to a shared server.  If I have to use some weird command line thingy to get this to work some weird server configuration then WASM won’t work. I’ve looked at Blazor a ton. Right now there’s two versions. Blazor on the server and Blazor on the client. Once the client version is flushed out Blazor is going to be the first WebAssembly framework I work with.

My only daughter Haileigh starts High School Softball. I’m very proud of my daughter. She has a passion for the sport and is really good. Besides that there are going to be some major changes in the Siegel household that I’ll save later on in the year. Here’s to hoping that 2020 is a better year that 2019.

 

Tags

Personal Web Development