Tag: thought

Rediscovering Web Development

Despite the rapid advancement of tools and specifications, web development has pretty much involved the same set of actions for a developer.

It all starts with an index.html file. An entire decade has been spent on just creating different ways to generate this file. From writing each line of HTML by hand to creating it on the fly using a shadow DOM we have come a long way.

Then comes the data that sits on these HTML files and followed by the interaction. The data flows from a data-source. Usually a database. The developer’s first task is to figure out a way to get this data from the database on the HTML. This is where a lot of action goes in. So much so that the quintessential phrase “Web Developer” has been replaced by “Frontend” and “Backend” developer.

But that’s all an old story, a thing of the past, a bygone era, remnants of an old civilization…. (looks dreamily into the void). Alight, I might be exaggerating a tiny bit, but I am in no way wrong.

The emergence of Low Code and No-Code Tools

As with everything these days, I stumbled into the world of low-code or no-code tools due to COVID-19. When India had only a handful of cases and people were trying to build a website to track the pandemic, I built a web app using Python Django which quickly became irrelevant and costly to run.

Instead, a live dashboard was built using Google Sheets as the database and API. A simple HTML page with some React code became the frontend. It was fascinating to see the innovative way in which the entire thing was working. At one point I saw 89 people actively editing the sheet, updating data, and 100,000 others consuming it on the dashboard. It changed the perception of web development completely.

Future of Web Development

Ever since I have been intrigued by this notion of building things on the web without the traditional idea of database-backend-frontend. While all of those things might exist, it is abstracted away in a way you are not actively working with a setting up VMs, database server, compiling code – that sort of nuts and bolts.

https://nocodelist.co/ is a website that lists tools that allow one to do that. It has tools for almost any task conceivable.

  • You want to draw the UI adjust colors and generate Angular code that you can just add business logic to – UI Bakery has you covered
  • You won’t convert your Google Sheets into a Database with a REST API – there are at least 8 apps for that
  • How about a drag and drop UI builder that you can directly hook into your database without a backend server? – AppSmith will let you do that

In each of the instances above, there is a lot of details that are abstracted away into the tool. Only the part which actually requires human decision making is left for the developers to decide.

Just as we moved from writing HTML by hand to building shadow DOMs using JavaScript, we might be moving from writing any JS to defining just the logic.

Conclusion

For a modern frontend developer, HTML is a second thought. The frameworks like React, Vue, Angular have created a way for us to think about the web in terms of components instead of HTML tags. We might soon be thinking about web apps in terms of user-flows while the frameworks will deal with the components.

You could even say, we already do and that I am late to realize it.

Thinking about the next step as a Python Developer

Disclaimer: The analysis is not a bullet proof analysis. Despite writing code, and throwing around numbers, this might still be a random observation. Stack Overflow Job board is a not an indicator of everything. So take everything with a pinch of salt.

Python or Full Stack?

As someone who identifies as a Python Developer and uses Python as the primary language for programming, thinking about what to learn next is confusing. I primarily do “Full Stack development”, that is write backend API in Python Flask/Django and use modern JS (React/Vue) for the frontend. But recently I am seeing a disconnect between the idea of “Python Developer” and “Full Stack Developer” in the job postings. Full Stack development seems to be defined more or less synonymous to JS development. Python Job postings on the other hand are more closer to dev ops, systems development, data analytics and machine learning.

A simple experiment

So, I devised a simple experiment to verify what I seeing is in fact something of a trend and not a random observation. Look at the job postings on Stack Overflow for skill demand and use that as an indicator.

  • Go to Stack Overflow Jobs
  • Set the “Tech you like” to node.js – 139
  • Set the “Tech you like” to django + flask – 61
  • Set the “Tech you like” to python and “Tech you don’t like” to django+flask – 266

huh, what?

Web Development in NodeJS is more in demand than Web Development in Python and Python’s general purpose demand is way more higher than Python Web Development.

For the sake of simplicity, I have considered Django + Flask as the entire Python Web development.

Okay, so my observations and confusion about “Full Stack Development” becoming more and more Node.js development is in fact valid and I wasn’t imagining it.

What’s up with Python?

Now I was intrigued with finding out what’s happening to Python. What are those 266 other listings? Where is the demand for Python coming from? Also, I am getting a little worried about continuing as a Full Stack (Python) Developer. To get a better idea of the situation, I downloaded the RSS Feed of the Job postings for Python + NodeJS, extracted the categories for each posting and created a map of the 30 most mentioned categories.

Selection_022

Each Job posting is a row with the top 30 categories as columns. If a job positing falls under a category, it is marked 1, otherwise zero. Then I created a heatmap of the correlation matrix of the table, which will tell me how the technologies are related to each other.

heatmap

Anything that has a positive correlation has the value printed in green. Armed with this data, we can make a few observations:

  1. REST and API are not correlated to Python, but to NodeJS
  2. Event Flask and Django are not correlated to REST API
  3. Python is associated with system languages like C, C++, and Java more than web technologies.
  4. Flask is associated with more technologies than Django. Especially to Micro-Services technologies like Docker and Kubernetes.

Predictions

  1. General purpose Python web development will probably go the way of Ruby-on-Rails.
  2. Python Web development’s growth will increasingly come from micro-services and API systems which will sit on top of Machine Learning / AI based services.
  3. PHP, .Net, Java all have their own full-stack definitions and job postings, but I think NodeJS will continue dominate this term.

Final Thoughts

Identifying the next thing to learn for a Python Developer doing Full Stack Development means identifying the area of focus. Taking the time to retool in Node.JS might be as good a choice as learning micro services architecture with a bit of DevOps or learning Data Science and ML. Picking a path and moving ahead is looking more of a necessity at this point.

And I am left wondering which path to choose.

Getting ready for planet CODE

With the end of TeachForIndia Fellowship around the corner, I am contemplating on jumping into the programming world. So here is a checklist of things that I am going to put up in place and document it along the way.

Get a decent mail ID

Though not strictly related to planet code, I wanted to have a decent email id. The one I used ~~aruntheguy at gmail~~ was created when I was 15 and not so professional. Hence I have moved the mail to arunmozhi.in.

Creating a online presence

These days online presence is mostly Social Media. I deleted my Facebook account and have only Twitter, but that alone isn’t sufficient.

So,
Moved blog from static-site Pelican back to wordpress for easy theming and maintanence
 Created a home page where I can showcase stuff

Customer Research

Making use of a skillset is all about selling it. So what do the buyers look for? Being a follower of Coding Horror I started of with his post on How to hire a programmer.

Here are the things I learnt:
1. Know to really write a program – I pass
2. Should have a portfolio – Need to create a portfolio page
3. Be culturally fit for the role – Depends on the company
4. Answer computer science theoritical/tricky/nerdy qustions – Well you can’t really prepare for them, can you? May be the theory part, but again when was the last time I thought about hash tables, 3rd year of my college?
5. Expect an audition project or a real world problem to solve.
6. Pitch in front of small group – have mixed feelings about this. But good to know this might be coming.

1 is done, 2 requires some work, 3 can’t really be worked on, 4 is subjective on how we look at it, solving puzzles and learning nerdy jokes is not the point, it shows the recruiter how we approach a problem and how much passionate about programming is a person. I will leave them at that. Finally, the points 5 and 6 are subjective to personal preference and circumstances as outlined in the comments by various people. I am sort of going to forget them for now.

Product preparation

I am the product, in case you are wondering. The article cited above and others linked in that article give a general idea about the product.
With that in mind, and my long time personal goals, here is the list of things I have in mind to do:

  1. Learn touch-typing!! Yeah, I am a pecker – albeit a fast one. – Done
  2. Learn Vim to the extent I am not going into v mode everytime to delete a set of words. – Ever learning
  3. Get core commit rights for QGIS – its time to work on itCouldn’t fit in time.
  4. Create a Portfolio/Resume/HireMe page
  5. Learn some tools of trade:
    • Plain text manipulations – Regex
    • Shell scripting
    • Code Editor – Vim
    • Version Control – Git + Github
    • Debugging Tools
    • Unit Testing Frameworks
  6. …….

I guess I will add more to the list as I set the goals. For now this should keep me focused.

The year of 2014

Basically I attempted two projects as a personal development venture.

52 Weeks 52 Books: Started with the objective of improving the number of books that I read in a year. Read about a total of 27 books in all this year. Better than any other year in my life. Though the project is a failure, I reaped huge satisfaction in the process.

52 Weeks 52 Maps: Started with the aim of creating and uploading maps for Wikipedia. I think I did only 8 in all. Even those were done in the initial one or two weeks. This failed spectacularly.

Hopefully 2015 would be a better year.

Obsession

I have been observing a pattern in my life over the past few months. I am obsessed about something in the evenings and the free time. It was books for a month, Far Cry 3 for another, and has recently turned into Chess.

I am trying to understand the underlying factor which is responsible for this behaviour. After reading through some pages about impact of games on human brain, watching the TED talks like Jane McGonigal: Gaming can make a better world and assuring myself that I am not really going crazy, I think I have a plausible answer.

Like all young people I need to have that sense of achievement.

Being a introvert, the above explanation makes a lot of sense. I am not uploading pics in Facebook, I am not tweeting even an average of 1 tweet/day – other things that could keep me filled with the achievement and appreciation factor I am looking for.

Obsession Hacking

The word hacking is being used in a lot of places where it means “modification” or “change” or “tweak”. I am trying to use it for channeling my obsession into something that could be productive – as in work – as well as supply me the required achievement factor. One activity which I know could do that is – Coding.

Taking a look at what I have done in 2014:

github_dismal

I think I would do what John Resig recommends – Write Code Everyday, starting from today December 1, 2014. Let me see how far the obsession hacking goes.

Update: December 20,2014
Well. This doesn’t seem to be as simple as it seems. Gaming, reading books, chess – all have been entertaining and relaxing. Because that is consumption of content. But coding is production of content, hence has proved to be a much difficult and straining task. I haven’t been able to get to coding at all. The experiment so far has been a big failure.