I’m so glad that I’m not just getting started as a web developer these days. Facebook is the main example I give to people when talking to about this. It has set the standard for what and how people think a web app should behave. Move forward or backwards through photos and they are dynamically loaded without refreshing the page. Send someone a message and a modal box appears with autocomplete on the textboxes. You can browse the site, chat to friends and do all sorts of stuff without ever having to experience a page refresh. I even remember when they added AJAX to their photo albums. I mentally flipped as it made the site so much more usable. I showed it to someone going “Look! Look! There’s no page refresh.” while they just shrugged and went “I don’t see what you mean.”, D’oh… exactly! The sort of stuff no one even realises is happening. But I’m sure they’ll feel the difference if they use functionality on your site that’s similar to something Facebook does, but which requires a refresh where as Facebook doesn’t. Even I feel the pain of moving forward and backwards through photos on Flickr. After the third or fourth page refresh, I just give up.

When I got started, web stuff was so new and so simple that in hindsight it was amazing what you could get away with. You could just fly by the seat of your pants. I know I did. The first piece of web development I ever did was back in the mid nineties two days before my first interview. I wrote a Java servlet that simply took a single text parameter and queried a MySQL database using JDBC. I showed it at the interview and got a job as a web developer using Perl. I didn’t even know the Perl but still got the job. All I had to do, day-in, day-out was write HTML and scripts that responded to clicked links or submitted forms. Submit, refresh and display the result, job done, I can go home now. Creating a site wasn’t hard, almost anyone could do it and almost everyone was at the time. Life was simple and it was pretty much a level playing field. Now though, it is a totally different ball game. You’ll need good knowledge of at least a couple of languages, HTML, CSS (Yes we need it to work across all the major browsers), SQL, Javascript + a framework like jQuery + how to use AJAX.

There is just so much that you need to know that if you’re not doing this in your spare time, how are you supposed to ever compete with the kids nearly half your age who can already do this stuff with their eyes closed. Even me, who does this stuff every day as a job has to learn more and more if I even want a chance of staying relevant and employable. I love learning, so it doesn’t bother me. Programming still turns me on and it has to if you ever want to make a go of doing this for a living. Sometimes you can be in the fortunate position of working for a company that really loves this stuff, so you can learn and grow, but I suspect the majority of IT related jobs are done in companies where IT is a second thought to their overall business goal. Where managers prefer to say “no” to your ideas rather then say “ZOMG we could totally awesomely AJAX dis bitch up!!!11!”. And the learning doesn’t just stop at work related subjects. There’s a lot to be said about learning new languages and techniques totally unrelated to your work. Not only for the mental stimulus but also how they can teach you to approach a subject in a new way. I admit this is perhaps one area where I don’t spend enough time, but I’m trying. So go forth and learn. Be totally fucking awesome.