Programming Today

A friend recently asked me my opinions on where he should focus on in terms of getting into the tech industry. He’s wanting to self-teach while he prepares to go to school to earn his paper degree. I wrote up my thoughts on what the current market demands are and what he can focus on. I figured, it served as a good summary to post here.

He mentioned that he had been looking and exploring Joomla in his spare time so far. However, I haven’t seen a lot of desire for Joomla in recent job postings. It was more popular a few years ago, just as Drupal was. WordPress is the dominate CMS/blogging software today. It has a huge install base, a lot of solid add-ons and themes available for it. Most small to medium scale websites serving as marketing for companies and blogs are done with WordPress. So, if you are looking for blogging software to play with then it is WordPress, in my opinion. There is another CMS that is popular but is focused on eCommerce sites: Magento. I have zero experience with it, but I know that new eCommerce sites will often be built with it.

In terms of web development, PHP on the back-end will always be popular. In the last few years, there has been a reliance on MVC frameworks. CodeIgniter has been popular and is what I have a good deal of experience with. Its popularity has lagged recently as development and support of the core framework became an open question. Other popular PHP frameworks that I have seen frequently in job postings include CakePHP and the Zend Framework.

I’ve noticed a significant demand for skilled front-end developers. This includes designing the sites with CSS and responsive designs (the Bootstrap framework is popular). Also, client-side scripting with JQuery, Backbone.js and AngularJS is becoming more and more popular. While jobs in the Austin area like to see applicants with both front-end and back-end knowledge, positions are generally specialized for one or the other.

The other area I’ve noticed demand is for mobile application developers (iOS and Android). Android development is easier to get into since the SDK is freely available and testing is possible both in simulators and on real phones. It uses a variation of Java for the programming language. To do iOS development you need a Mac computer to run XCode (its IDE). While you can test your applications in the simulator, to test on a real device you’ll have to pay to join Apple’s Developer Program.

While my friend lacks a degree and work experience in development, he does have some experience in systems support. If he wants to do IT and network support then the A+, Network+ and Security+ certifications are a good place to prove his knowledge. I once had A+ and Network+ certifications, but support has never been my favorite thing to do. Cisco certs are really advanced networking certifications and involve hands-on administration during the tests. It proves networking administration abilities far above the CompTIA and Microsoft certifications do. They can pull in a lot of money in the right area, or at least it used to. Novell, in my opinion, is going to be specialized in its small segment of the industry and shouldn’t be a big priority unless you have a job that wants it.

And that's computer programming today (and systems administration) as I see it today.