When I got my first job as a professional programmer (I define “professional programmer” as someone that gets paid to code) there were no differences between front-end, back-end and dev-ops, everything was englobed by a single title called “web developer”, and as a web developer you took care of the front-end, which when I joined the workforce meant JQuery or—if the company was feeling fancy—AngularJS; then you were responsible for developing the back-end which usually entailed dealing with good’ol PHP, I’m talking 5.2, not the awesome language it is nowadays, and if wearing a suit and a tie was a job requirement you were probably working with Mr. “I run on 3 billion devices” aka Java, by this point you’d think that was it, but no, once you had something working it was time to release it, with your own bare hands, usually by ssh’ing into a Linux server, or, dare I say it, Windows Server, there was also glorious FTP (File Transfer Protocol) for those who don’t know, which made deploying as simple as drag-n-droppin things from A (your computer) to B (your server) and hoping for the best.
And from the tone of this writing you may be extracting that this do-it-all-by-yourself approach was a pain in the ass, to which I respond, YES, it sometimes was, but to this day I haven’t found anything that comes close to the developer experience provided by this way of working; I’ll go even further by saying that having had all these things on my plate is what made me develop a perpetual beginners mentality, to the point were when given a problem to solve I’m a hundred percent confident I’ll figure it out, be it writing an HTTP client in Odin, a static-site generator in Go, or CI/CD pipelines in Groovy, I. DON’T. CARE. because I know how to program.
When I got my first job as a professional programmer (I define “professional programmer” as someone that gets paid to code) there were no differences between front-end, back-end and dev-ops, everything was englobed by a single title called “web developer”, and as a web developer you took care of the front-end, which when I joined the workforce meant JQuery or—if the company was feeling fancy—AngularJS; then you were responsible for developing the back-end which usually entailed dealing with good’ol PHP, I’m talking 5.2, not the awesome language it is nowadays, and if wearing a suit and a tie was a job requirement you were probably working with Mr. “I run on 3 billion devices” aka Java, by this point you’d think that was it, but no, once you had something working it was time to release it, with your own bare hands, usually by ssh’ing into a Linux server, or, dare I say it, Windows Server, there was also glorious FTP (File Transfer Protocol) for those who don’t know, which made deploying as simple as drag-n-droppin things from A (your computer) to B (your server) and hoping for the best.
And from the tone of this writing you may be extracting that this do-it-all-by-yourself approach was a pain in the ass, to which I respond, YES, it sometimes was, but to this day I haven’t found anything that comes close to the developer experience provided by this way of working; I’ll go even further by saying that having had all these things on my plate is what made me develop a perpetual beginners mentality, to the point were when given a problem to solve I’m a hundred percent confident I’ll figure it out, be it writing an HTTP client in Odin, a static-site generator in Go, or CI/CD pipelines in Groovy, I. DON’T. CARE. because I know how to program.