Hacker News Reader

Comment by rex-mundi | Hacker News Reader

Any chance you could list the skills/knowledge you feel have kept you marketable?

Asking as I'm just about to reach mid forties and I'm a Frontender who feels the same as the OP.

If I have a go at moving to backend one concern I have is that I wouldn't know what skills are just nice to have's and what's an essential skill so I could waste too much time learning the wrong things.

View on HN

Sure. Glad to help :). Bash/zsh/scripting in general, combined with nice productivity tools like fzf, vim (really speeds up your work when you know it well and you can get vim plugins for VSCode/PHPStorm/InteliiJ etc). However, don't sweat not knowing vim if you at least have one very good editor available everywhere that you know well. Docker, (which often just amounts to knowing what shell script to put in a dockerfile), fair amount of exposure to AWS, short-cutted by using the command line cli combined with jq. (AWS is a beast, so don't try to keep on top of it all, but master the basics like e:g how to list S3 bucket from command line), some exposure to Terraform, wouldn't say I really know it, but I could edit some tf files and add stuff then go in the AWS console and look what it created (but I'm really a dev, not an infrastructure eng, so this works out to be enough). Python (lots and lots of it). Python is super useful for knocking out stuff quickly. Python will always be useful IMHO, for decades I believe. PHP I don't know fantastically but I can scrape by. Java ditto although I really don't like Java. C++ I did years ago , for years, don't really do it now much but occasionally comes up. Makefiles = a truly ancient but v useful skill. Soft skills like being pedantic about nailing down requirements precisely. Being nice to other team members and easy to work with (but I'll let them be the judge of that ;) ). One key thing I think is I always adored the command line, and shunned GUIs , not a massive fan of IDEs. Guess which one of those stays current and guess which one gets completely changed around and/or falls out of fashion. ; git- make sure you know that reasonably well especially the command line (sure its a PITA to get to grips with, but worth it). In general, mess about with Linux a little bit in your spare time (within reason, not letting it get in the way of family time.). See if your partner will switch to Linux even if not a geek. My wife has, and MS Windows drives her nuts compared to it. ;). Even our daughter messed about with some terminal commands like cowsay etc. ;). why is that even relevant here, well it keeps you in that groove of discovery and enjoyment. IMHO anyway. ;). running C sharp/dot-net core on Linux is something I enjoyed , nice language on a nice platform..

Reply on news.ycombinator.com