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Comment by swendoog | Hacker News Reader

Uhg, I'd love to be that 50 year old when I arrive at the age. Sadly, I feel like I'm sliding backwards. Oddly, I feel like I was a better, more thoughtful, certainly more energetic developer in my 20's.

I think some of it may be that each job I've taken has forced me to change language / platform multiple times. I'm an iOS, android, C++, C, Java, and python developer. All on production level code. Never an expert of any.

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I decided early in my career to specialize on a technology stack so I could generalize over the entire stack. About a decade ago I got my first job on the Microsoft stack, and since then I've done 98% of my work on it.

It has it's disadvantages I'm definitely looked at as an old fuddy duddy because of my language choices. I'm pretty locked in, so if .net dies I'm gonna screwed while I come up to speed on the next big thing.

But it has its advantages too. I'm able to go deeper on a bunch of different parts of the stack than I would if I were having to jump around more. Web, desktop, services, database, mobile and even vba in Excel. There's no way I could be as proficient across the stack as am if I had to be proficient in different technologies. And it's allowed me to feel pretty confident addresssing any business problems as long as it's on the right stack.

I did the same thing for the first half of my career - ASP.Net and C#. But with the fall of WebForms and the rise of MVC, I had to spend a lot more time on front ends (mainly cheap clients didn't want to pay the licenses on Telerik and the ilk), so I had to learn real html and javascript (albeit only jQuery at first).

Now I primarily use those tools on personal projects, and spend most of my day consulting on HOW to develop a project, and only able to get my hands dirty a couple of hours each week. The rest of the time is spent with management "architecting" solutions.

I was wondering if you could give me a little advice as to what I should focus on to more specialize in the Microsoft stack?

I'm on a bit of an unusual track into software engineering, having started in finance and first teaching myself to code via VBA and SQL. That coding led to me getting a second degree in computer science, which I'll be finishing this year (and I now know way too much about VBA).

All that of that preamble to say that I've had a ton of experience with SQL Server, VBA, Excel in my old life. I think I could be a pretty good candidate to fully immerse myself in the .NET stack. However, my school doesn't touch much on the .NET technologies, focusing more on JavaScript, Python, and C++.

Would it make sense to focus on C# and move on from there? Or there other things I should know well? Do you use much PowerShell? Javascript?

Thanks! Sorry if this was a bit long.

I'd be familiar with c# but it's an easy language, and there are tons of devs with c# experience.

But I'd mainly focus on JavaScript/TypeScript. And if you're about to graduate then focus really heavily on react or angular. Microsoft shops are drowning in .net talent/experience but are starving for good front end devs with deep angular or react experience.

And I wouldn't bother with powershell at all, unless you have wanted to move away from development and towards infrastructure.

This is really helpful, thank you. I've been diving into heavy doses of JavaScript lately -- I'll continue with that and augment it with TypeScript and React too.

I can attest to this. Having worked in an finance shop myself, there were numerous .NET engineers there but none of which had relevant experience with Angular/React + Typescript.

This makes sense. MS office is moving to the “cloud” and extensions are now programmed in JavaScript or TypeScript (also a Microsoft project).

I think programming is one skill it doesn't change much by language if at all. So if you have a good grasp of OOP principles you're on a good path.

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