I just found out about The Odin Project, a self-paced online course to learn full stack web development. There are two paths: one is Ruby on Rails and the other is full JavaScript and nodejs. I am leaning more towards Ruby but I wanted to get some more opinions from folks in the field.

  • Cheery@lemmy.sdf.org
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    1 year ago

    As a front-end developer with 10 years of experience, I’d suggest going with JavaScript. It’s one language for both stacks, you can learn the core front and back end ideologies, and if you decide to go with a different language for back-end, it shouldn’t take too much time to learn afterwards. From my experience it would be easier both to learn and potentially to get a job in the field.

  • themoonisacheese@sh.itjust.works
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    1 year ago

    From what I can tell (maybe it’s just jobs around me) employers are not really looking for ruby devs. Since you’ll have to learn JavaScript anyway for the frontend I don’t see a reason to go ruby beyond personal challenge.

    • Meow.tar.gz@lemmy.goblackcat.comOP
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      1 year ago

      Thank you! Then it sounds like the more sensible path is JavaScript and nodejs. While I like the idea of personal challenge, I am trying to learn how to do this so I can get out of the skullduggery of my present career as a senior desktop support engineer. I see myself more going towards DevOps with it. From the reading I did about DevOps, it seems that I would need at least some familiarity with a programing language. I am thinking if I could get a handle on JavaScript and python, I would be in pretty good shape, yes?

      • Vlyn@lemmy.ml
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        1 year ago

        DevOps is usually more backend or full stack (though in bigger companies it’s its own job entirely).

        Python is always a good start in that regard. But honestly, the basics for programming are pretty much the same across languages (with a few exceptions). So you could go with JavaScript, C#, Python, … whatever beginner friendly language you prefer.

        This course gets you started extremely fast (Python, but in your browser, so no need to install anything): https://www.codecademy.com/learn/learn-python-3

        Personally for a learning language and if you’re using Windows I’d lean towards C# (With Visual Studio Community, it’s free). It does give you a good idea of what data types, classes, etc. are and if you want to dive deeper you can transition to C++ afterwards to learn about memory management and pointers (but it’s not a fun language to work with, in my personal opinion).

        As for DevOps, you could do the first courses for Azure (https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/training/paths/microsoft-azure-fundamentals-describe-cloud-concepts/) or AWS (https://skillbuilder.aws/?dt=sec&sec=fdt).

        If you have any questions, feel free to ask :)

  • dragnucs@lemmy.ml
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    1 year ago

    You will not find much to do with Ruby. Node is more popular and more in demand. A lot companies and OSS project have o Node. Ruby is very niche.

    • Meow.tar.gz@lemmy.goblackcat.comOP
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      1 year ago

      I thought Ruby was still pretty relevant given that Mastodon is essentially coded in Ruby but I am coming to the same conclusion you are based on another person’s comment.

      • taladar@sh.itjust.works
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        1 year ago

        Ruby is used in some large, older existing projects (e.g. GitLab, Redmine, Puppet) but my impression is that a lot of them do not have very much active development of the Ruby parts going on any more.

        • bric@lemm.ee
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          1 year ago

          Yeah, which makes Ruby one of those languages like COBOL, you can make a lot of money if you’re in that world, but I wouldn’t ever recommend that someone should try and join that world, it’s going to be too hard to get in to and it might not stick around for long. I know some people that make a lot of money working in Ruby, but that doesn’t mean that anyone can, unlike javascript which will be valuable anywhere

          • crusa187@lemmy.ml
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            1 year ago

            Probably a few reasons for this. I’m not a ruby dev so take this with a grain of salt.

            Ruby doesn’t have a lot to offer beyond languages like Python or Go without its companion web development framework Rails. Ruby on Rails was good for its time (~2012 -> 2015 era was peak), but there are more mature, stable, and widely adopted frameworks available in other languages. RoR touted speed to develop as a feature, but you can do things plenty fast with the aforementioned languages too. On the flip side, rails apps are notoriously slow to boot. I think this became a problem with cloud native infrastructure. For example, Kubernetes likes to spin up services very quickly, and can be painful to work with if that’s not an option (experienced this with Java apps too for that matter). As self hosting on bare metal went by the wayside, so too did interest in developing new apps on rails, imho.