HACKER Q&A
📣 Icecreamsushi

How to get back to web programming after a 8-years break?


I was a full-stack dev in a Californian startup in 2012. I knew ES6 and CSS's specs by heart. Except for the "ensure IE6 compatibility", life was simple and vanillaJS was still a thing. AngularJS was the default choice, and Laravel was the cool framework to do backend stuff.

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.

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.

I'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/jenkins/docker/etc. for small projects?

Any advice on where to start? :)

  👤 Nextgrid Accepted Answer ✓
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.

👤 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.
👤 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).

👤 manicbits
These roadmaps (especially frontend) might be helpful:

https://roadmap.sh/roadmaps

👤 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.

👤 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.
👤 fiftyacorn
Id start with Freecodecamp - you dont have to complete the modules but chose the ones relevat to you
👤 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.
👤 buboard
way more complicated how?