I've done web applications for over a decade now. It is always in a state of flux. Recently, Javascript has become actually useful. ES6 fixed some of the nastiness, and there are a plethora of libraries that are really, really good. I prefer Angular over React, because I like the cross-platform capabilities between mobile and desktop. Angular works well with Cordoba, so you can target Android and IOS on the mobile side.
I've worked mainly with Ruby on Rails. And it is hard to beat its productivity. Elixir, especially with Phoenix holds a lot of promise for the future. Internet of Things seems to settling on Python. But Elixir also holds promise, this time with Nerves. I can source out of China a box, 50mm on a side, with a 4 core processor, ethernet and wifi, 512meg of RAM and a microSD card for storage, for less than $20 quantity one. The implications of that are large...
The only constant is change. Right now the lines between mobile and desktop through a browser have blurred. And that opens a lot of things.
As to your skills, I wouldn't worry about it much. You have a solid background and it is software engineering principles that are more important than the details. To transition, I'd recommend looking at backend and middleware. Python or Ruby are good scripting languages for server side, Python is more popular, Both are c++ derivatives, as is Swift, so that shouldn't be that difficult. If you want to be more edgy, a functional language like Elixir or Clojure, Scala if you have some Java, might be better. Don't do PHP, though. |
