How My Side Project Helped Me Switch Tech Stacks

Several years ago I was working with a tech stack that I didn’t particularly enjoy. One of the frameworks in that stack started with an ‘Angular’ and ended with a ‘JS’ 😉. I was just beginning my career and knew that to be more marketable I was going to need to learn a more modern framework. Heck, even Angular was abandoning AngularJS.

I left my former company to join a small startup where I learned EmberJS which I enjoyed enough (kinda) but the market for Ember developers is fairly niche. ReactJS dominated the list of skills employers were looking for, especially in the SF Bay Area. If I wanted to work for one of the many startups dotting the SF landscape, I needed to know ReactJS.

Maybe you too are in this position: a junior to mid-level developer working with tech that is dated or just not your bag of beans. How do I switch? Where do I find the time? Am I doomed to work with whatever language my corporate overlords agreed on a decade before I heard of this company?

Finding tutorials or YouTube videos to teach you everything from data science to Scala is trivial nowadays but gaining practical, applicable knowledge from these bite-size or not so bite-size courses (how many 30 hour tutorials have you seen offered on Udemy?) is not always straightforward.

Don’t fall down the tutorial hole. The only real way to approach mastery of a framework or language is to build stuff. Ugly stuff, barely working stuff. But this is where you really have those aha…