Hey! It’s been a while, 4 years in fact. It’s really strange looking over my old posts, I was so young and hopeful back then… and the idea of having to set up a bunch of build scripts with a bunch of different tools just so I can get things like importing and exporting modules, and correct use of the this keyword didn’t make me sick to my stomach.

Oh, How times have changed.

Four years feels like a lifetime in dev terms. So much has changed since then, back then I was very Junior, had a couple of years under my belt, and I was mostly learning as I went along. One half of a team of two developers, a small fish in an even smaller pond leaving me with a sense that I was much better than I actually was.

Not anymore, now I’m a RealDevelopertm working for a real software house. I’m considered one of the senior members of the team. There are people that actually listen to my advice. I have to make decisions. I’m a larger sized fish in a much bigger pond. I cannot brag enough about how big my fish has gotten.

But I’ve also had plenty of humbling moments since then and met developers much MUCH stronger than I, whom I aspire too, and I have also made my fair share of mistakes. I’ve learned that being a good developer is not about showing off how smart you are, or chasing new shiny things. It’s about practice, discipline, not being a jackass, and helping other people. I’ve earned a new level of professional pride.

I am also much more cynical than I was back then… allow me to indulge in some stream of consciousness reminiscing.

Tech has changed, front-end development has matured greatly from my days of yore, instead of libraries and frameworks like KnockoutJS and Ember, we have libraries and frameworks that do the same thing as them; like React and Angular. (They do the same thing, but faster.)

ES2015 is supported in browsers, like, really supported. But we all still use tools like babel anyway, because ES2015 is for old men like me.

4 years ago I was laughed at for getting excited about Typescript. Now everyone wants a piece of it.

JavaScript isn’t a joke anymore, now it’s a big deal, in fact, its probably the most popular language, or at least it feels that way. You can use it to write server-side applications without people laughing at you. You can use it to build desktop applications. You can even use it to build native mobile apps for Android and iOS with one codebase. There are even some insane developers out there who want to write CSS in JavaScript.

Bower is gone, (remember Bower?) instead we use NPM for our front-end dependencies or yarn. Build tools like Gulp, Grunt, Brocolli… nobody talks about them anymore; Webpack is the guy now.

There are these things called PWA’s. Web Assembly is allowing people to REALLY show off. Blockchain exists! Things are moving closer and closer to the idea of desktop (or native, as we’re calling it now) like web applications.

Some developers have even come up with this crazy new idea of rendering pages server-side. (Brilliant! Why didn’t we think of that before!?)

Thinking back, there is so much to learn now that it’s overwhelming, I cannot imagine what being new to all this is like in this climate - it must be exhausting.

I think I’m going to go have a lie-down.