The things I wanted to learn and what really happened

  Four years ago this day I was blogging about a list of technologies that I wanted to learn or at least explore. It was a very ambitious list, with the idea that I might shame myself into studying at least part of it. Apparently, I am shameless. Anyway, this is a follow-up post on how it all went down. 

.NET Core: MVC, Entity Framework, etc.

  I actually had the opportunity to use ASP.Net Core at my job. I didn't have a lot of it, though, so I just did the usual: start working on something, google the hell out of everything, make it work. I used .NET Core 1 and 2, moved to 3 and now they are just getting out 5. Was it useful? Well, actually no.

  The state of the software industry is in constant flux and while new technologies pop up all the time, there is also a strong force moving the other way, mainly coming from the people that pay for software. Why invest in a new technology when the old one has been working fine for years? Yeah, don't answer that. My point is that while staying current with .NET Core was a boon, I didn't really see a lot of paying customers and employers begging me to do anything with it. In fact, I left my job working on a .NET Framework 4.7 automation project to work on an ASP.Net MVC 4 application written in Visual Basic. So I am learning things that are new to me, but really are very old.

  All I am saying is that there is a paradox of job opportunities for technologies that you are supposed to know and be an expert in, but for which few have had the courage to actually pay before.

  Bottom line: having been familiar with older technology that made .Net Core exist, it was kind of simple for me to get into it, but I am not an expert in it. The fact that software generally moved to the web and that server code is now as slim as it can be also undermines the value of being proficient in it. That is, until you really need to be.

OData and OAuth

  Simply said, nothing on this front. These are mostly related to frontend stuff, to new web facing applications that can be found at a public URL. I have not worked in this field basically since forever.

Typescript, Angular

  Oh, the promise of Typescript: a strongly typed language than compiles to Javascript and can be used to code in using static analysis tools, structured code, clear project boundaries! I had the opportunity to work with it. I did that in a much lesser degree than I should have. Yet the tiny contact with the new language left me disappointed. Because it is a superset of Javascript, it inherits most of its problems, can be easily hacked and the tooling chain is basically the Javascript one.

  I commend Microsoft for even attempting to develop this language and I see that it has become popular indeed. I like C#. I like the vanilla Javascript of old. I dislike the weak hybrid that Typescript seems to be. I may be wrong. Things might evolve in very interesting directions with Typescript. I will wait until then.

  And Angular has also grown in a completely different beast. I thought Angular 1 was great, then they came in with version 2 which was completely different. Now it's 9 or 10 or whatever. I liked the structured projects and how easily data change could be controlled from non-UI code. Yet did it all have to be this complex?

Node.JS, npm, Javascript ES6+, Bower, etc.

  I thought that since I like Javascript, I might enjoy Node.JS. Working with Typescript I had to have contact with npm and at least install Node on the computer. Yet I got more and more disillusioned. A complicated chain of tools that seem to be targeted to a concept of "app" rather than a website, for which you need a completely different set of tools, the numerous changes in the paradigm of Javascript and the systems using it and, frankly, a lack of a real reason for using Javascript when I can use C# made me stop trying to get in on the action on this front. And before I started to understand the Node ecosystem, Deno appeared.

  Personally it feels that Javascript is growing too fast and uncontrolled, like a cancer. The language and tooling need to stabilize and by that I mean cut some of the fat away, not add new things. I loved some of the additions to the standard, like arrow functions, let/const and block scope, nullable and spread operators, iterators and generator functions, but then it just started to get more and more bloated, like trying to absorb every new concept in all of the other languages.

  Bottom line: it is ironic that I am now working in an app that must work on Internet Explorer 11, so I cannot even use the new features of the Javascript standard. And yes, I hate that, but at the same time I can do the job just fine. Food for thought.

Docker

  What a great idea this Docker: just tell the system what kind of setup you need and it creates it for you. It can even create it for you from scratch every single time, in isolation, so you can run your software without having to install all that heavy crap I was just telling you about above. And yet I hated it with a vengeance from the moment I tried to use it. With a clear Linux vibe, it wouldn't even work right on Windows. The images for these pseudo-virtual machines were huge. The use was cumbersome. The tooling reminded me of the good old days when I installed a Slackware distro on any old computer, without X system, of course, and then compiled beta versions of every single software I wanted to use and repeated the process whenever I had an issue.

  For a tool that is supposed to bring consistency and ease of use, it worked really inconsistently and was hard to manage. I understand that maybe all that would have gone away if I invested the effort of understanding the whole concept, but it really felt like going backward instead of forward. One day, perhaps, I will change my mind. As of now, I am just waiting for the person who reinvents Docker and makes it do what it has promised to do: ease my life.

Parallel programming

  Hey, this is actually a plus! I had a lot of opportunities to work with parallel programming, understanding the various pitfalls and going deep in the several types of parallel programming concepts in .NET. Am I a parallel programming guru now? No. But I went through the await/async phase and solved problems at all levels of parallelism. I don't like async/await. It is a good idea, it is great when you start a new project, but to add async/await in existing legacy code is a pain the butt. Inevitably you will want to execute an async method from a sync context, control the order or amount of parallel processing, forget to call an async method with await or trying to run one parallely by not calling it with await on purpose and finding that your scope has been disposed.

  Bottom line: I don't have to like it to use async/await, but I feel (without actually knowing a perfect solution) the design of the feature could have been better. And now they added it to Javascript, too! Anyway, I am comfortable in the area now.

HTML5, Responsive Design, LESS/SASS, ReactJS, new CSS, frontend

  A lot of new stuff to learn for a frontend developer. And how glad I am that I am not it! Again I hit the reality of business requirements vs technology requirements. To learn front end development right now is a full job that you have to do alone, for free and in your spare time. Meanwhile, the projects you are working on are not on the cutting edge, no one wants to change them just to help you learn something and, again, these concepts are mostly for public facing web applications. Maybe even mobile development.

  It does help to know all of this, but it is not a job that I want to do. Frontend is for the young. Can I say that? ReactJS, the few times I looked at it, appeared to me to be a sort of ASP for the browser, with that ugly JSX format that combines code and markup and that complicated state flow mechanism. Angular felt too stuffy and so on. Every time I look into frontend stuff it seems like software for the server side from twenty years before.

  Bottom line: If any web framework appealed to me, that would be VueJS! And no one used it at any of my places of work. It seems a framework dedicated to staying simple and efficient. And while I want to know the concepts in all of this stuff, why would I go deep into this when I need a UI designer for anything with a shape? I will be waiting for the resurgence of simple frameworks using the new features of HTML99 and that do not require to learn an entire new ecosystem to make anything work.

WPF, UWP

  I remember I absolutely loved developing in WPF. The MVVM concept of separating the UI completely from the code controlling it, which is then completely separated from the data models used, was very nice. The complete customizability of the UI without changing the code at all was amazing. The performance, not so much. But did it matter? I thought not. Yet the web obliterated the tech from the development world. I believe it deserves a rebirth.

  That being said, I have done nothing in this direction either. Shame on me.

Deep learning, AI, machine learning

  I really wanted to understand and use artificial intelligence, especially since I did my licence paper on neural networks. I love the new concepts, I've read some of the stuff they came up with and I've even been to some conferences on machine learning. Yet I have not yet found the project that could make it worthwhile. Machine learning and especially deep learning projects require huge amounts of data, while working on the underlying technology requires advanced knowledge of statistics and math, which I do not have.

  It seems to me that I will always be the end user of AI rather than working on building it.

Conclusion

  So there you have it: I worked on .NET Core and parallelism and even microservices, dabbled in Typescript and Angular, created a full on LINQ implementation on Javascript and later Typescript. Meanwhile the world went more and more towards frontend and mobile development and Node and stuff like machine learning. And presently I am working for a bank, coding in VB and using jQuery.

  Strangely, I don't really feel guilty about it. Instead I feel like I am still going on the path of discovery, only more of myself rather than of a particular technology. The more I wait, the more new stuff appears and makes whatever I was dreaming of learning obsolete. I even considered not being a developer anymore, maybe becoming an architect or application designer. When something new appears, the immediate instinct is to check it out, to see what novelties they come up with and to find the problems and then discover solutions, then blog about them. It's a wonderfully addictive game, but after playing it for a while, it just blurs into the same thing over and over again. It's not the technology that matters, but the problems that need fixing. As long as I have problems to fix and I can find the solution, I am happy.

  I ask you, if you got to this point, what is the point of learning any technology, when you don't have the cause, the purpose, the problem that you have to solve? An HR person asked me recently why I keep working where I do. I answered: because they need me.