
Ask HN: How to get back to web programming after a 8-years break? - Icecreamsushi
I was a full-stack dev in a Californian startup in 2012. I knew ES6 and CSS&#x27;s specs by heart. Except for the &quot;ensure IE6 compatibility&quot;, life was simple and vanillaJS was still a thing. AngularJS was the default choice, and Laravel was the cool framework to do backend stuff.<p>I became CEO of a SaaS startup and stopped programming for the past 8 years. I now want to get back to developing my own projects on the side, but the world has become way more complicated.<p>My goal is to develop simple SaaS products, mainly for my own needs. Think of vertical todo-lists, connect a few APIs, etc. Mobile accessibility (PWA or native) and having a nice design are a must for my future projects. Back in the time, my strengths were in JS, PHP and Python.<p>I&#x27;ve tested no-code platforms (Bubble.io, Glide, etc.) but I was quickly limited by the lack of flexibility. Is the world in 2020 easier to integrate designs? Do we really have to learn npm&#x2F;jenkins&#x2F;docker&#x2F;etc. for small projects?<p>Any advice on where to start? :)
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Nextgrid
You haven’t missed anything and your skills are still relevant if you want to
_solve problems_.

Laravel or Python with server-side rendered pages is still perfectly valid and
will be better than the majority of websites today. People who say otherwise
have their career at stake because they know nothing but React and need to use
it everywhere (regardless of whether it’s necessary) to ensure their survival.

You don’t need Docker either. It helps in some cases but also adds an extra
layer of abstraction and moving parts so I’d avoid it when possible. If your
app just relies on a database and maybe a cache server it’s easy enough to
install those locally without Docker.

~~~
Icecreamsushi
Thanks a lot!

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arpitbatra123
If you are good at ES6 and css, then you’re halfway there. You can build a
full stack web application if you know JS with the help of some frameworks. My
personal preference for a JS frontend framework is React and for the backend,
I prefer express which runs atop node. It is definitely easier in 2020 to
develop a web application but the JS ecosystem is too fragmented these days so
avoid the shiny object syndrome if you’re serious about making something. npm
is a module registry and you can pull in 3rd party dependencies for your app
from there, so yeah you might have to learn to navigate your way around it.
jenkins and docker are not so necessary in the initial phases as you can
offload CI and Cd to SaaS providers such as netlify but the pricing of these
providers is steep so you might want to move on from them.

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kugelblitz
I find Django a good place for rapid development, Laravel is also great and
cranking out new features all the time, but I feel the rate of change is too
high for me.

There's lots of options for frontend but since you wrote "Mobile accessibility
(PWA or native) and having a nice design are a must", there's no way around
than digging deeper into frontend / design. I haven't seen a no-code tool (a
la Webflow) that translates to good code for larger projects. On paper
probably Ionic would fit what you want, but I feel the development experience
quite lacking. I'm using Flutter for my mobile apps, and starting to use more
and more of Django for backend / full stack (I used to use Laravel, then later
Symfony extensively, and they're both still fine options I think).

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Icecreamsushi
Ok, glad to have a python-point of view. Why did you switch from Laravel to
Django? I prefer to use Python than PHP, but except for data-science stuff, I
never used python for web dev. I suspect that the learning curve is not that
steep?

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manicbits
These roadmaps (especially frontend) might be helpful:

[https://roadmap.sh/roadmaps](https://roadmap.sh/roadmaps)

~~~
Icecreamsushi
Thank you so much! The visualisation makes it very clear to see where I stand.
I love it. It's funny to see how much has been developed after the "Build
Tools" section in those past few years. Most of the technologies were in beta
a few years ago.

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saluki
Laravel is even more popular now.

I'd checkout Laravel again, Laracasts.com might be a nice place to start.

If you liked Angular checkout Vue and Alpine js.

Good luck with your SaaS.

~~~
Icecreamsushi
Thanks! I think I'll go with Laravel indeed. Vue.js looks more adapted than
React, but would that be a bit more difficult to develop a mobile app with Vue
than with React (using React Native)?

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wprapido
Fundaments haven't changed much. Pick a JS framework and go from there. It's
gotten more complicated, indeed. But, if you're building projects of your own,
you're free to ignore it as there are not that many palpable benefits, and
your users / customers couldn't care less about underlying tech stack.

~~~
Icecreamsushi
Eactly. I was targeting personal ease of use. I remember that handling
authentification in JS was a pure nightmare, so I have a strong bias towards
frameworks handling that for me.

~~~
wprapido
80% of cases, you don't need a framework.

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potta_coffee
Laravel is still awesome and VueJS is really popular with Laravel devs right
now (afaik). Vue is super easy to work with and there's a ton of documentation
and examples for integrating it with Laravel. If I were in your position, I'd
go with that stack.

~~~
Icecreamsushi
Perfect thanks. I'll go with Laravel. I still have a question about how Vue
does on mobile, but a quick search for Vue.js made it clear how easy it is.

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fiftyacorn
Id start with Freecodecamp - you dont have to complete the modules but chose
the ones relevat to you

~~~
Icecreamsushi
Ok thanks for the link!

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buboard
way more complicated how?

~~~
Icecreamsushi
This article relates really well my feeling now: [https://hackernoon.com/how-
it-feels-to-learn-javascript-in-2...](https://hackernoon.com/how-it-feels-to-
learn-javascript-in-2016-d3a717dd577f)

