I have been out of a boot-camp program for a few months now and I am still navigating what I should spend the bulk of my time learning. As I hunt for employment, there are so many various tech stacks being used by potential employers that I am torn. Should I learn a new framework, a new language, or worry about styling?
Since graduating, I feel as though I have learned a little about a lot, which doesn't really give me the feeling like I have really made a dent learning any one thing. I heard my main instructor speak about Ember and how it was a pain to learn based on how strict it was, but once you learn it you won't use anything else. While I would agree with him on how strict it was with syntax, having similar commands as Ruby on Rails and getting as much as you do with a few simple commands was very convenient. But after a few days with it, I was on to something else.
I entered a ten-day hackathon with a few cohorts that required the use of a react front-end, a node middleware, and a firebase for storage and cloud functions. We divided the work. I was team back-end with two technologies I was unfamiliar with using. About four days in, we realized that the middleware was really making things difficult, it would have been easier to cut that out and just connect firebase to the front-end. I learned just enough to get through while having fun and simultaneously stressing out about bugs that needed to be addressed (thank you google!). I did have some issues trying to play catch up on what was node.js and what was firebase.
After some thought, I have decided to devote true time to learning node.js. There are identifiable reasons for this decision. I have already looked into different front-end frameworks. Ruby on Rails is the only true back-end framework I have worked with on my own, with a project. It is also my understanding that node.js does not have relationships with its data. I don't know if this is true, however, it is something I am ready to learn and implement with an experimental project. I am excited to continue to learn and I am ready to give more time to getting further into frameworks before moving on to something new.
