About Me
Seven Years Later
What started off as a proof-of-concept and a hobby has grown to be... still a hobby. That is my website, which I first brought live in February 2010, more than 8 years ago. In these 8 years, the world has changed, as have I. Since I decided to re-write my website earlier this month, I thought it would be a good chance to also update this section of my website with a seven year update, since the last time I had updated this section was back in March 2011.
These last eight years have seen my career grow and blossom as a software developer - more specifically, a web developer. I have been constantly learning, and have watched the internet evolve, with many trends coming and going, such as:
- The rise and fall of Wordpress popularity (which was the biggest trend back in 2011)
- The rise of Facebook, Youtube, Twitter and Twitch, which replaced blogging with posts, vlogging, tweets, and screencasts
- The rise and fall of jQuery (once the de-facto JS library every site used has mostly been absorbed into native JS functionality)
- The rise and fall of Ruby on Rails (once strong and mighty, it is no longer the new shiny toy, though its many positive advantages have since been adopted by frameworks, both new and old)
- The rise and evolution of frontend JS frameworks (single-page applications and server-side rendering)
- The hype of HTML5
- The rise of Twitter Bootstrap, which spun off to become Bootstrap, which now is being replaced by Material Design
I have to admit that the skills that my job has required has also evolved. What used to be most useful, the skill of writing JS functionality to do useful things, and debugging them, has largely been taken care of by a combination of improved native browser JS functionality and freely-available JS libraries. Instead, the skills that are now most prized are the ability to quickly learn and adopt or integrate new frameworks, and to write code in a way that is modular, in order to be able to switch out frameworks as trends continue to come and go. On top of that, asset pipelines and testing have gained significant importance in the development process.
And so, being at my fourth company, now, I am making almost triple the amount of what I started my full-time career off making, back in the depths of the Great Recession. By nominal measurements, my career has thus far been a resounding success, and I am quite happy with the path I have taken and with the experiences I have accumulated, both technology-wise, as well as socially, and finally where I have ended up now.
On the whole, my life has been quite stable these last eight years. The economy has been on a steady upward trend of recovery, and this has translated to steady employment, especially in the field of web development, where there was a period of high demand, and my skills were highly sought after. That period may be coming to a close, but I am confident that I have been on top of things, and have kept my skills relevant.
Of course, in the process, I have also matured and have lost the feeling of everything being new, fresh, and magical, when I am able to see things work, though I still take great pleasure in working on these side projects. I'd say I've mellowed out, and some things that used to mean a lot to me - such as my hobbies and notes, haven't really been updated in years, and should probably be retired.
And thus, my goals for this website have largely remained the same, though I will probably focus solely on three sections in the future:
- Projects - where I will showcase the side projects I've been working on
- Blog - where I will put all my personal ramblings
- Rhema - where I will put the things that I have enjoyed from the Bible
March 18, 2018