The Dulin Report

Browsable archive from the WordPress export.

Results (31)

The future is bright Mar 30, 2025 Software Engineering is here to stay Mar 3, 2024 On luck and gumption Oct 8, 2023 Book review: Clojure for the Brave and True Oct 2, 2022 Why don’t they tell you that in the instructions? Aug 31, 2022 Monolithic repository vs a monolith Aug 23, 2022 Scripting languages are tools for tying APIs together, not building complex systems Jun 8, 2022 Good developers can pick up new programming languages Jun 3, 2022 Java is no longer relevant May 29, 2022 Automation and coding tools for pet projects on the Apple hardware May 28, 2022 There is no such thing as one grand unified full-stack programming language May 27, 2022 Best practices for building a microservice architecture Apr 25, 2022 Tools of the craft Dec 18, 2021 What programming language to use for a brand new project? Feb 18, 2020 Which AWS messaging and queuing service to use? Jan 25, 2019 The religion of JavaScript Nov 26, 2018 Let’s talk cloud neutrality Sep 17, 2018 TypeScript starts where JavaScript leaves off Aug 2, 2017 Design patterns in TypeScript: Chain of Responsibility Jul 22, 2017 Amazon Alexa is eating the retailers alive Jun 22, 2016 What can we learn from the last week's salesforce.com outage ? May 15, 2016 Why it makes perfect sense for Dropbox to leave AWS May 7, 2016 OAuth 2.0: the protocol at the center of the universe Jan 1, 2016 What Every College Computer Science Freshman Should Know Aug 14, 2015 The Three Myths About JavaScript Simplicity Jul 10, 2015 The longer the chain of responsibility the less likely there is anyone in the hierarchy who can actually accept it Jun 7, 2015 Big Data is not all about Hadoop May 30, 2015 Exploration of the Software Engineering as a Profession Apr 8, 2015 Thanking MIT Scratch Sep 14, 2013 Have computers become too complicated for teaching ? Jan 1, 2013 Scripting News: After X years programming Jun 5, 2012

Good developers can pick up new programming languages

June 3, 2022

I have heard arguments over the years along the lines of this:

We need to use programming language X because developers proficient in this language are easier to recruit.

Developers deserve a lot more credit than that. Most developers can pick up new programming languages reasonably quickly, especially languages in the same general category used together. For example, few Java business application developers cannot know SQL, and few front-end JavaScript engineers can get away with not knowing CSS.

I was, presumably, a Java developer for roughly 18 years of my career before 2015. At a minimum, I used Java and SQL for my work, which was considered an essential requirement. I used UNIX shell scripts for automation. If I ever restricted myself to being exclusively a Java developer, I had to know at least 3 programming languages just to get my work done.

I believe that pigeonholing myself into a single programming language or a single platform would have been detrimental to my career, and I am glad I never fell into that trap. Where are, may I ask, all the Deplhi developers?

Perhaps, we shouldn’t be recruiting developers based on some single technology they know but on what they can learn and apply in the future. A generalist developer that can pick the right tool for a given taskand articulate why they made such a decision is a lot more valuable than a specialist.