| Recently I marvelled at how far we have come since 1999, and how many changes in focus that meant. Not just tech itself, but also paradigms and methodologies. Like the OP I started doing with design-y tasks as an intern in a web shop. Then followed a lot of t.gif style table layouts. Then followed some flash development, and my fist scripting with ActionScript and copy-paste JS stuff. Then ASP classic and PHP. Then followed the push towards semantic html and progressive enhancement, and the first JS libs like mootools started popping up to be eventually boiled down into jQuery. Couple years later and it was all about MVC frameworks, databases and so on. Like the OP I did php based stuff, and it meant learning 4+ different frameworks, i.e Cake, Zend, Symfony and so on. At the same time there was Agile and TDD coming into the mix and you had to learn a whole lot on how to do your work. Following that I started looking into node pretty early on and that shifted my understanding of JS as a language and pushed me into the niche where I am working today, namely JS stuff be it server or client. Looking at the current tech choices and popular stacks, or even just the browser APIs available and coming, I cannot believe how far things have gotten.
On one hand things have become a lot easier for menial dev tasks, you have things like bower and grunt/gulp whatever really helping you, boilerplate generators and the likes. Deployment is often just a git push so some PaaS or some docker file and shell script.
On the other hand is just SO MUCH OF IT, that it's impossible to keep on top of even one aspect of the stack properly if you need to get on with making stuff and have a life. If you just take the browser these days (audio API, Web GL and so on).
In 15 years of dev work I have learnt and forgotten so much that my brain feels like a sieve. My approach to deal with that is to not desperately try and REALLY remember many things. Instead I just focus on the current stack I'm working with and remember the general concepts of that, plus some good knowledge of where to look for things. Come the next project in a different stack I basically anticipate a learning curve. |