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Help a Frustrated Developer to get back into developing…

1 points by TsomArp ↗ HN
Hello Hacker News. I am a software developer/engineer that has gone through the management path, and didn’t liked it.

I have been out of software development for 8 years, and now I want to start learning new technologies so that in the soonest possible future I would be able to get a job in development.

I know OOP and procedural programming, but I want to either do front-end or back-end development, or maybe both. But the problem is that it is overwhelming the amounts of new technologies and languages to learn.

What would be a good path for back end development? And front end? What about desktop Java development? And for each case, what would be the top 3 or top 5 books to follow/read at each step?

Thank you very much. A frustrated manager.

2 comments

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externalreality
Wow, you really have been out of the loop for 8 years. These days all you have to do is read a Rails/Ruby tutorial and go find one of the infinitely many jobs available out there. Once you get the feel for writing code again and get you skills back look for another more satisfying job.

Most productive programmers know that it is impossible to judge how productive another coder is by any method short of actually working with them. So interviews these days, I find, are significantly easier than they were 8 to 10 years ago when people asked irrelevant math questions to judge how productive of a coder you are.

Some points:

The world of programming has changed significantly in the last 8 years -- all the stuff you may have thought was good programming practice is now questioned by a dozen and a half blog posts/articles. Even the mighty if statement is under fire.

I think in general programmers are more friendly than they were 8 - 10 years ago. Perhaps because there are more of us which is forcing more of us off our opal pedestals and back into the reality that we are just blue-collars.

So brush up your CV get in there and join the mighty throng.

TsomArp
Thank you for replying. My problem is that I want to start programming for either the web (front or back), desktop (¡java/python/ruby?), or mobile (¡android/ios?). In the case of web, either front or back, there are 100s of tutorials, and 100s of technologies, and 100s of frameworks. Same for Java and maybe less for mobile. So I just want to know what would be the path of quickest start, because if I try to follow all the options, I would be ending up doing nothing.