Stay ahead of the game, or stay on top of the game?

I am having difficulties choosing a backend technology.

I started off with PHP, however, I am trying to move away from it.

Then you have nodejs that enables developers to use JS on the serverside.

The creator of nodejs left the project years ago. He indicated there is flaws with nodejs.

He has since started a new project called Deno, developed with Rust and uses Typescript.

I am having difficulties determining which technologies to invest my time into. I fear that I will invest my time in a technology and become comfortable with it to soon discover it is depricated or not as useful as a another technology.

Then, let’s say I pick up a new technology in its early stages. There is a chance that technology would never take off and could be scrapped.

If you continue to program, I can guarantee that you will work in technologies that become obsolete. I can promise that you will work hard to learn something and then never end up using it professionally. Programming languages and technologies aren’t something that you get to learn once. You will always have to be learning.

@ArielLeslie

Thanks for the feedback.

Would you still recommend investing time into Node? There are so many technologies out there, I am indecisive.

I kind of want to learn them all, but I can’t.

Regardless, I am thinking about using a REST API approach when building web apps and decouple my frontend from my backend.

Node is definitely a relevant technology to study. Really though, choose something you want to make and then learn the technology to make it.

1 Like

@ArielLeslie

I have this major project idea that I have made several attempts to create. It is a very large-scale project. Should I start smaller or tackle the big one?

It depends on you. If you have made several aborted attempts, then I suggest that you figure out why you haven’t continued to work on it before. If you do decide to keep working on this project, how small can you make it for a first draft? Is there a much simpler version that you could eventually build into your larger project?

-Ryan Dahl “Although I was once reserved about recommending it for mission-critical applications, I now heartily recommend Node for even the most demanding server systems."

Companies using Node.js: IBM, PayPal, Ebay, Walmart, Mozilla, Netflix, Uber, Groupon, Medium, NASA, LinkedIn, Trello, Microsoft, Rakuten, SAP, Yahoo, Twitter, Reddit, Fitbit, InVision, Disqus, Wikipedia, DuckDuckGo, etc…