Comment by Tommy Hodgins on "Are most developers living in a cocoon?"

I think so, I feel like the world of tech is exploding in size and surface area, imagine people living on a continent that's growing and gaining in size. Unless you make a deliberate effort to 'tour' and see some of the other areas you might miss them.

Some anecdotes:

I once went to an iOS developers meetup, even though I don't do iOS apps. I thought I would almost fit in since a lot of what I do is designing for mobile devices (web apps), but when I got there I was like the odd one out. I was a spectacle, and they were all talking to me like I was a foreign alien or something. Right next to the room with the iOS meetup was a Clojure meetup, and my guess is that nobody from the iOS group really even talked to the programmers one room over :/ I've been to general, and interest-based meetups, but I wonder how many people go a little outside their comfort zone to try to expose themselves to new people, new ideas, and new opportunities.

Another anecdote: I've been doing webdev for ~15 years and so I can recall a time before PHP dominated the market. Today the backend is more diverse than ever, if you want to use Ruby, Python, PHP, or even JavaScript (or dozens of other languages) you have your choice of well-supported, well-documented frameworks that let you start anywhere … and yet so many people I talk to just simple aren't aware of backend web that exists outside of 'current JS frameworks', the Node/NPM ecosystem.

I work with clients and still to this day, 100% of the clients I work with are all using PHP on the backend. I have played around with Node on my own time, but so far I haven't even witnessed it in a professional setting. So I do think people need to expand their understanding of the world that's out there.

The most common reaction I hear from users when they find out my clients don't have a Node backend is that it's somehow not modern or up to date, that we must be working on legacy systems and the best thing we could do is throw out our non-JS backend and replace it with a 'proper' Node backend…it's not just that they aren't aware of anything beyond the JS ecosystem, they're in disbelief anything but JavaScript can run on the server 🤢

It's fine to focus on learning one little thing, focus is good - but it's not good to be blind to everything else.

Amen to the fact that developers should venture out of their comfort zone!

I have an anecdote too: The recent engineering team that I took over, had a backend in PHP. But the way they structured the application was in fact, in a legacy way — there was almost no "engineering" in the frontend whatsoever! Views were generated in the backend, and the server sent plain HTML files to the client. This is okay for a small application, but for an enterprise application that is supposed to serve millions of users;

generating a new view for every route,
having no data caching policies in the client,
having no state management in the frontend...

...would lead to a horrendous client performance, as the application scales! I think this exemplifies a part of the problem — guys doing PHP here, have cornered themselves to what they know best; which is why diversified teams are a need of the hour!

What's more, we need cross pollination of ideas across groups. Instead of telling them, "Hey, you should be doing this, why don't you know of it yet!" ... we have formed a new frontend engineering team which works with these PHP developers, and we have weekly meetup sessions where this new team talks about build systems, and frontend engineering, and UI architectural problems.

Inclusivity is the key!

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