Confessions of a Full Stack Developer

David Walsh has a great series he does called Confessions of a Web Developer. I've been reading them since about part 6 or 7 and I enjoy…

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David Walsh has a great series he does called Confessions of a Web Developer. I've been reading them since about part 6 or 7 and I enjoy every one of them. I have been struggling with content here for a long time and he had some great tweets over the past few days that motivated me to put more effort into this blog. I'm really great at complaining so I figured I'd follow the master. As always, opinions are my own.

  • I haven't felt challenged in my work for a long time. Thankfully, I'm in the position that I can inject challenge into my work. I try new design patterns, frameworks and testing strategies.

  • I've put a lot of effort into my Youtube channel, but it takes way too much time and dedication to run it well. I've kinda given up on it. Gathering resources and preparing a tutorial for a 10 to 20 minute video takes me about 20 hours of stop and go work.

  • I'm a hypocrite when it comes to commit messages. I tell everyone to keep them descriptive, but the last 50 commit messages to my personal repo is "stuff".

  • I look over a lot of resumes at work. I pay more attention to where you have worked and how long you have worked there. I value loyalty more than skill. A developer with 2 - 5 year employments is more valuable to me than someone with 10 - 1 year employments. Constant jumps tell me you are more interested in promotions than improving your skills.

  • I can't show off the vast majority of the projects I've worked on due to NDAs. I've been apart of developing and launching around 75 products. I've worked on around 125 if you include projects I've done maintenance or consulted on in the last 7 years. I can maybe talk about 15 of them. I feel like this puts me at a disadvantage in the job market, but I'm not looking for a job so it's not an big deal.

  • I want to tell people that bash IE to just "Shut the hell up". It's beating the dead horse with his own fossilized bones. We all know IE 6, 7, and 8 are challenging to develop for. I think most of these people are too high on their Mac horse to look and see how much effort Microsoft has put in the newer versions of the browsers.

  • You're dead to me if you hate on Win 8 without a good reason. The start screen change is not an acceptable answer.

  • To this day, I do not understand why open source developers hate on .Net developers. I've even seen ".Net snobs need not apply" on a Ruby On Rails job posting. It feels really immature.

  • I'm in a constant battle of whether I want to dress professionally or like a geek. I have a large collection of shirts, but I was known as "tshirt guy" for a long time. I really want to be respected, but it's challenging wearing a Zelda & Dr Who crossover shirt.

  • I don't think you deserve the help if you didn't spend 15 minutes trying to find the answer on Google. You need to put some effort into it before asking someone to stop what they are doing to help you.

  • I value being an Eagle Scout more than being a college graduate. I didn't take away a lot from college, but it did provide me a reference that landed me my job.

  • I only allow recruiters on LinkedIn to contact me so that I can tell them no. It's an ego thing.

  • I've haven't found responsive web design challenging or interesting in several years. I'm sure some people would say "You're not doing it right". I've looked at a lot of sites, gone through source code from frameworks, and read many articles. I'm confident in my skills and capabilities.

  • I judge you based on whether you use a GUI or command line for tasks.