The state of the ‘developer ecosystem’ in 2019 by software development company of note: JetBrains.
In the beginning of 2019, JetBrains -a software company whose tools are geared towards software developers and project managers- polled almost 7,000 developers to identify the State of the ‘developer ecosystem’. The resulting article can be found here, in all its glory, but we thought we’d break it down for ya and give you some of our thoughts…
-Java is the most popular language. “Most developers will use multiple languages, so …it’s kinda silly to get caught up in what’s the most [popular].
-JavaScript is the most used overall language. “That makes sense because JavaScript’s in the web browser, if you’re doing React, Angular, if you’re doing a basic website, you’re going to be using JavaScript.”
-‘Go’ is the most promising programming language. “I would put ‘Go’ on a ‘perhaps to learn’ list. …The top languages to learn are HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Python…”.
-TL;DR.“One thing that you see across all the surveys, that JavaScript, Java, Python, HTML, CSS … SQL, these are all coding languages and in some cases programming languages that are always at the top or near the top of the stack. And another takeaway that were on all the surveys is that the web stack is still by far dominant.”
The VLOG goes into more detail, with more educated extrapolations and a sweet scenic boat or canoe ride. -Enjoy!
Should you continue to learn Python, even if Python jobs in the area are more or less in data sciences or other areas you’re not interested in?
So, what if you’re learning a language; Python in this case and you start looking around at possible jobs and realize that all or most of the jobs for Python are ones that you have no particular interest in? Do you stop learning and move onto something else?
“I think it’s a good idea to learn multiple languages, …every time I learned a new language my skills as a developer went <sound of a rocket taking off>, rocket[ed] right up. All these modern languages…they all share so many of the same qualities, but they look at things from a different point of view.” Think of it in terms of hanging out with different friends, even though hanging out with different friends has a lot of similarities: having a drink, talking, laughing, etc, the experience will always be different, ya know?
We’ve said it here before but there is no such thing as a wasted language, because each language learned is like a tool in your tool box, there will be an occasion to use it. Now that being said there are some obscure tools out there and if you’re getting into this business to make money, you’re probably better off learning to use the most popular tools. But, hey, you’re an adult and as you become more experienced in this field, you’ll figure out what’s worth your time…
Check out the VLOG, there’s a lot of great info, including some commentary on Swift and JavaScript. -Enjoy!
Google announced it would comply with U.S. government restrictions meant to punish the Chinese tech powerhouse.
Google suspended some of its business with Huawei by restricting access to Android updates. Huawei could lose its grip on the No. 2 ranking in worldwide cellphone sales but amidst espionage and technology theft accusations, that would be the least of their worries. This article from the verge and this CBCarticle pretty much sum it up, as will any other online news article you search for (depending on your news outlet).
But what does this mean for developers in the field looking for work? Will this affect the number of jobs out there?
Nah. “I don’t think there’s much implications. That’s it, if you work in China, and then maybe work for Huawei or for the Chinese it’s not so good for you…”. In fact, “if you’re in North America or Europe it’s going to be good for you because they’re going to start moving things back here…” What will this mean for China, whose chief economic advantage was “cheap” labor? Well, it’s hard to say as the North America is also in massive debt to China and other countries but as with most things, only time will tell.
The VLOG offers more insight into the subject and some sweet drive-by scenery of Montreal towards the end. -Enjoy!
The tech giant will still support Java but Kotlin is king for Android development.
A quick snippet to be sure, but Google has announced that when it comes to Android development, going forward it will use Kotlin. There will still be support for Java, “…but in terms of documentation, new libraries and so fourth…they said, ‘that’s it! Kotlin is our beast’.”
Without sounding like a broken record (probably a dated reference…), this does go back to what we were saying about a language that is easy to write in, generally gets more use/support and ends up winning out over more verbose/heavy languages. “Kotlin is an easier language to write in, it’s far more productive so…if you are looking for native Android development (and that I think is going to diminish over time…), …then I would lean towards Kotlin.”
The VLOG goes onto mention other casualties in the “simplicity wars” of languages and frameworks, like Apple’s ‘objective C’ being replaced by Swift. It’s worth a look just for the nostalgia factor alone. -Enjoy!
Is Microsoft starting to embrace ‘openess’ in it’s push towards the web platform?
A couple of months back Microsoft announced their new ‘Fluid’ framework and we read off the intro from an article at the beginning of the VLOG at the bottom of this page, so we’ll spare you that here… But what makes this announcement interesting is that Microsoft seems to be moving away from native apps, systems, etc and embracing a more ‘open’ operation. It’s even “…going towards the web platform, …it’s embracing web technologies: think html5, css3, javascript versus native development…”.
This is something we’ve touched on in past articles and even dedicated a whole VLOG to here, and Microsoft is just another great example: “…when you’re not sure which way to go, always go for the open technologies, …because open technology typically wins out over closed technology”.
We even went so far in a past article to say the native development languages like ‘swift’ for iOS or ‘kotlin java’ for android were going to go down to the open web technology solutions. Now we’re not saying that we know it all or that maybe we have the gift of premonition or anything like that, but it looks like Microsoft seems to be having a ‘premonition’ of their own…
The VLOG, of course, goes into more detail and is worth checking out but we want to let you know about a really cool offer by clicking here. We’ve teamed up with InMotion hosting for a really amazing offer where they essentially pay for you to take my course and learn how to become a web developer. Links to the offer below as well. -Enjoy!
…That’s ‘Positive Mental Attitude’ for ‘Progressive Web Apps’…
We keep on getting requests to cover PWA/RWD’s and because we’re not DJs or that small band at the back of the bar that’s playing ‘only originals’, we’re taking those requests…and 5-6-7-8…
So a PWA is a progressive web app and an RWD is a responsive web design. How are the two related? Well first off, “RWD is basically writing your HTML5 and your CSS code so that the layout of the site will flex and change depending on the size of the screen of the web browser that is visiting your site. So if you have a smartphone or a 75 inch flat panel TV, a properly coded responsive website or web app will look just fine.” So the idea being that fonts, images, layout, etc. will change size depending on the size of the screen you’re viewing them on. As you can imagine, with the way consume data and media, it was a pretty big deal.
Okay, but where does the PWA come in? “…A PWA is basically taking RWD to its ultimate highest level. Essentially…you can think of it as RWD on steroids, because it brings in all the power that comes with native HTML5 and CSS (and you throw in some JavaScript to add some extra capabilities, of course…).” “The big advantage of using a PWA over native is you have one code base, so instead of having to write one app in iOS with SWIFT, and then having to write the whole app again from scratch for android in JAVA or KOTLIN. PWA is a lot cheaper to get your app out there, and [while] you don’t get the full benefit with a PWA that you get with native, you get a lot of the benefits.”
Now the VLOG will go into really good detail weighing the pros and cons of PWA or native (and believe me there are way more pros), but as a dev or a freelancer you should always be thinking about where businesses are coming from. Most of the time they’re not interested in the “nerd” implications of the languages, frameworks, etc. that you use, they just want to get up and running fast and get the product or service out there and PWA is your best bet. -ENJOY
Mobile app development has moved toward hybrid apps, using the web stack (HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript,) and frameworks like Phonegap or React Native.
But when it comes to the development of high demand (in terms of performance) mobile apps, using native languages like Swift for iOS and Java for Android is still the way to go. This might change with Googles Flutter framework.
In JavaScript, you have a bunch of events that you can tell the web browser to watch for. Here is a short list:
onclick
onmouseover
onmousedown
… There are many more. The proper nerd-term for all these is ‘event listeners’ – they ‘listen’ for events to happen and when they do (ex: someone clicks on a something,) you can have JavaScript fire off some function.
Event Attributes
Instead of using JavaScript to apply eventlisteners (using the addEventListener() method) to tags on your page, you can simply use HTML event attributes. For example:
<p onclick="aFunction()">
This is some text.
</p>
In the above code, I tell the browser that if someone clicks on the paragraph tag, that the ‘aFunction’ function should be activated. Nerds will refer to this as  ‘calling a function’ instead of activating.
The Death of onMouseover?
The onMouseover event listener ‘listens’ for someone to hover their mouse over the element (HTML tag) that it is bound to – like what we did with the paragraph tag above and the onclick event.
It’s a sweet effect and works on all the browsers, except it doesn’t work on mobile devices – that sucks! You have to remember that within a few years, more than 50% of the Web’s traffic will be mobile traffic – people using smartphones and tablets.
Basically, that means you should probably not use onMouseover event listeners.
