’ve been developing in JavaScript for a long time and have seen client side techniques evolve drastically over that time. However, I have to say right now is about the most frustrating (and promising) time to be working with JavaScript in a professional capacity that I’ve seen in many years (and possibly ever). Let’s do a little retrospective of what I recall from back when I started really getting into computers.

One thing that separates successful career programmers from those with a bit…less success (we won’t call it failure, because it usually doesn’t manifest as abject failure, but rather as stunted potential) is their ability to figure out their value to the people who are retaining their services. Regardless of what that job posting says, what the recruiters tell you (more on this in a minute), or what you’d like to hear, you are NOT ever hired into a position simply to write code. You are hired to solve a problem that someone has, with the expectation that your solving of said problem presents an advantage greater than that provided by simply keeping (or using elsewhere) the money required to hire you. It’s a simple thing that is missed fairly frequently when discussions of programmer salaries come up, as well as when programmers sit and complain about the messes they deal with at their jobs. It also happens in just about every other industry. I’ve had similar discussions with people in other industries. The fitness industry, for instance, is loaded with people who live under the belief that the fitness program they are selling is actually the reason they have clients, instead of what the clients are actually there for, such as losing weight, gaining muscle, just the feeling of accomplishment and pushing past obstacles, etc. The dividing line between the successful ones in that industry and those who are unsuccessful is also remarkably similar, in that the latter fail to line up their offerings with what their customers are actually buying, versus what they think they are selling.

Having started my training as a programmer in the 90s with 16 bit Visual Basic 4 and having seen them at their worst on several occasions, it’s often easy for me to take the side of people who don’t like the company (except Apple fanboys, because their platform has exhibited a lot of bad, anti-competitive and destructive behavior of late as well and more recently). I’ve seen them destroy competitors, build up a huge userbase on a platform that made building applications easy and then torch it on the altar of progress, and even keep security-hole-riddled crap around for years that caused compromised systems and grief for users for decades. Consequently, I’ve tried on numerous occasions to switch to linux, and ended up coming back to windows (usually after some config file got hosed and cost me a day of work). I’ve lived through ODBC database access, DAO, RDO, ADO, ADO.NET, Linq-to-Sql, and Entity Framework (whose early versions drove me to use NHibernate). I’ve seen ActiveX in the browser, VB webclasses, silverlight, and even FoxPro. I’ve even used Visual Source Safe…. I’ve essentially had a love-hate relationship with Microsoft for a very long time.