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Updating your outdated knowledge by moving to a new web stack

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After a few years working with the same framework and language, you have stopped learning new ones. Life got in the way of learning and you let the habit die down, since the knowledge you have is enough to do your job well.

But now, you’re finding yourself worried about your skills and job prospects: your web stack is outdated and the market has moved on to something else. Change for the sake of change is absurd, but you’ve reached the point where putting some effort into it is warranted if you don’t want to stay stuck maintaining legacy ASP.NET WebForms or ColdFusion applications forever.

Fortunately, if you need to update your skills, you can pick up things where you left them and learn a new stack in a few months to a year depending on the free time you have. Many tools and frameworks have risen and fallen since you stopped learned, but the same patterns and practices are used. The tools are better, but nobody will mind if you missed a few frameworks along the way.

It’s easy to get overwhelmed by all the choices available, but you don’t need to spend ages evaluating which web stack you’ll pick up: all the popular ones are worth learning. If you don’t have a preference, choose the one that’s most popular for the kind of job you want to do. For example, startups are more likely to use NodeJS and Ruby on Rails on the backend, but in big businesses ASP.NET MVC or Java is common.

When you start working on a new project, it’s doubtful that the stack is going to be identical, so you don’t worry about the details:. The point is to learn what a modern stack look like and not a specific set of tools: if your knowledge of JavaScript, HTML and CSS is solid, you won’t have trouble adapting.

I’ve written a lot about learning as a software developer, but if you already know what’s your specialty and you only want to update your skills, you can follow this quick and dirty plan:

  • Step 1: Follow a course or a book that describes a good development workflow using your new stack.
  • Step 2: Build a small application on your own to apply the concepts you learned.
  • Step 3: Work with others on a project. It’s not always possible, but this will cement your learning.

You won’t be comfortable with your new tools right away, and you need to keep an open mind to get the most out of your learning. But it’s worth putting in the time and effort to learn a new stack so you can take pride in your skills instead of just scrapping by with knowledge you know is obsolete.

When are courses counter-productive?

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When you wish to improve your programming knowledge, choosing the next course you’ll follow on platforms such as Udacity, Coursera or Udemy is exciting. All the courses descriptions promises that you’ll learn great new skills you can use to build cool projects and to improve your career. It’s also very easy to get started by just pressing a button. When you’re going through the process, the feeling of growing your knowledge is awesome and you’re surrounded by a community of learners going through the same process. Finally, you get the satisfaction of finishing yet another course and you can brag to your friends that you’ve collected a few dozen courses in a variety of complex domains. What’s not to like about it?

Learning and deepening your knowledge is more than just following instructions from a teacher. Most of those courses follow a similar format and difficulty level, and will teach how to be a beginner in a variety of domains and programming languages. You’ll master the process of completing courses, which may feel like the right thing to do to learn new skills. It’s easy to default to courses to learn new skills, but you must make sure it’s worth it and that you’re not just collecting certificates. You also must be careful not to become too comfortable with the process: if going through a course is a breeze every time, you’re probably not stretching yourself enough and you’re using this learning technique as a crutch that will slow you down.

I’m not saying that following a course doesn’t take any effort or is worthless, but choosing courses at random is a poor use of your time if you wish to grow as a software developer. In fact, the current state of online education is awesome: there are great courses available to improve your knowledge on any subject, and they’re a valuable tool to have in your learning toolbox. I don’t regret the old times when all we had to understand a programming language was a few thick books. But there are so many courses that you must cut through the noise to find those few that will help you reach your goals. You need to focus on a few core skills instead of signing up for everything that sounds cool.

Also, following a course is the beginning of the learning process and not the end. If you wish to really understand the material, you must use what you’ve learned, form your own opinions and improve beyond what you were taught. Don’t be afraid to start making your own mistakes, to share what you have learned and to make code that will be used by real people. You won’t have the time to do that if you’re cranking out certificates: you’ll get a lot more out of the courses you do follow if you do your own work that’s beyond what’s presented instead of sticking to the curriculum and stopping when it’s done.

Reaching an ambitious goal takes time

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Working toward a goal is easy if you’re just starting out and everything is fresh and new. For short-term goals such as learning a new programming language, reading a book or completing a course, it’s not hard to see it through if it really matters to you. You just need to follow the process and you can reach the end relatively quickly without losing steam. You’ll have many of those goals over the years and they’re essential if you want to keep improving as a software developer and keep up with technology.

On the other hand, you also have long-term goals that shape your path as a software developer such as:

  • Choosing to study and work as a software developer.
  • Committing to writing blog posts or giving conference talks.
  • Starting an open source project or getting involved with an existing one.
  • Moving to a brand-new technology stack to keep up with the industry.

It’s motivating to have such an ambitious goal when you’re just getting started. You’re growing fast as a newbie, and nobody is expecting you to be an expert the first day: everything you do is an occasion to learn. But after a while, those big goals gets harder to manage. You’re on your own and you’ve reached what seems like an endless plateau, making you wonder if it’s still worth it.

Plan for the long-term

When you commit to a large goal, you need to be aware that results won’t come quickly and that you must keep working regularly to reach your goal. You won’t become a star blogger or a recognized open source contributor in a few months. You can see good progress in a year, but if you really want to see strong results that have an impact on your life, a five-year commitment is a good timeframe to aim for. Think back on your career and hobbies up until now: did you really master anything worth it after only a few months of effort?

Looking at what you’re going to do in the next five years may seem like a very long time in our fast-moving world, but you need to give yourself the time to grow and learn. In your first year, you’re just going to start seeing some results. Once you’ve mastered the basics your progress is going to slow down, but you must keep working. After you’ve accumulated a few years of experience, it’ll start snowballing faster and everything will click. Voilà, you’ve finally reached your overnight success!

Give yourself time

If you stick with a job, a career path or a project for only a year or two, give up, and start all over again, you’re not giving yourself enough time to see where it could take you. Reaching a large goal is like growing a tree: at first, you’re laying down your roots and strengthening yourself without any visible results on the outside. You need to give it time to grow, instead of complaining that this tree is taking too long, yanking it out and trying again.

You also need to be flexible if you want to keep growing. If your goal is too restrictive, you won’t be able to adapt when it doesn’t work as planned. For example, if you’ve committed to increasing your number of open source contributions, you don’t want to force yourself to work on a specific project. Things can change and it may not be the best project for you after a few years. You also need to stay alert so you keep growing and don’t repeat the same year of experience 5 times.

This blog was started as a five-year project, and I’m at the start of year three. There are a lot of people with larger blogs, but I’ve improved my writing a lot in the last two years. If I gave up after only six months, I would have missed on a lot of growth, speaking with interesting people and even giving a conference talk. I’ve not been doing the exact same thing since day 1: I’ve tried writing very technical posts (such as my series on Android storage), and posts about being a software developer such as this one. I’ll surely explore other kinds of writing before the 5 years are up to keep learning.

What are you going to work on during the next five years?

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