5 years away from programming, boy have things changed | Hacker News Reader

5 years away from programming, boy have things changed

dannydo.es

53 pointsfellars9 comments

While he drops a lot of names in there (php, mongo, rails, etc.) I'd summarize it in a more general way - in the last 5 years the entry barrier to building highly functionable online apps has been lowered due to the rise of quality opensource abstraction layers and frameworks, and rapid exchange of knowledge/solutions through online hacker comunities.

What makes me happy is he's a proof that a programmer can spend 5 years under the ice and his programming skills are still valid, he just has to learn new toolsets. Also, I like how he quickly decided to skip the whole Objective-C/Android Java scene and jump straight to HTML5/Javascript for making mobile applications, which I believe makes sense for the type of apps I’m working on., looks like taking a break from the market isn't that bad after all.

Yes, this seems to be a good case of the Law of the handicap of a head start(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_the_handicap_of_a_head_s...), as we call it in Dutch. By not having invested in technology over the last five years, he is not burdened by that investment as others in the business will be.

Op here. Agreed, although part of me wishes I was involved during that time as I would have been right in the mix and could have caught that wave pretty early on. But there will always be another wave coming, which may be the html5 approach.

The buzzwords might have changed but for the last 40 or 50 years software has mainly been about forms (getting data into databases) and reports (getting data out of databases and formatting it for the user). 99% of the web falls into this category. Once you have been in the industry a while you see history repeat again and again. COBOL back in the day was a sexy as RoR is now...

Op here. Very true, which is why I didn't feel like I was a fish completely out of water when returning, but that my tools were outdated and I had to go out and buy new tools.

I had to select all the text to be able to read it.

Contrast please !

You may find this useful: http://www.readability.com

I never use it, but Safari's Reader will actually make the text readable with no need for an additional tool.

Op here. I agree. I bought this theme on themeforest because I wanted to play with twitter bootstrap and it was the only theme using it. I like some aspects of it, but the post readability is not great. I'm not much of a UI/CSS guy, so anyone with suggestions on how to improve it are greatly appreciated.

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