The 3 technologies you want to learn now if you are a contractor

After scouring AngelList’s job list for days, I could see a pattern in what jobs are more popular at startups. To be fair, this is a little bit biased towards Silicon Valley-type startups, but as many of them hire remote devs now, you could be interested in them.

If you look at LA startups, the trend changes already, leaving you with a lot of offers in the PHP field. But if you look at the bulk of offers for contractors, this is what you will notice.

Node.js

With its simplicity and the fact that it uses a language familiar with front-end developers, Javascript, and tools like Bower, already used by devs that employ Backbone or similar technologies for single-page applications, Node is a very popular choice.

It reached enough stability that Amazon bet on it by making it the first supported language by its new microservice infrastructure, Lambda.

Also, with its event-based architecture, it makes concurrency a default feature of the framework, it being very useful for high traffic applications like social networks.

AngularJS

The documentation says:

HTML is great for declaring static documents, but it falters when we try to use it for declaring dynamic views in web-applications. AngularJS lets you extend HTML vocabulary for your application.

Originated within Google, AngularJS is a growing trend for front-end developers, providing a framework for client-side MVC (Model-View-Controller) and MVVM (Model-View-ViewModel), along with other useful components.

Data binding, XHR requests, package management and templates are as good as any other JS framework, but the twist is the focus on readability, which you get by creating your own tags (directives), to define a breadth of reusable components.

iOS

Native mobile applications are here to stay and iOS is as huge a platform as you can find. Naturally, startups (even Nifty) flock to the platform for their first app, but the need for high standards of design and development makes it hard to find a good iOS developer.

With the introduction of a new, lately open-sourced, language called Swift, Apple managed to raise the interest in the platform even more. Its syntax looks Rubyish and it doesn’t involve memory management like Objective-C.

My suggestion is to learn Swift right now, if you want to work with average, non-high performance apps.

Is Ruby dead?

I cannot really tell why Ruby contracts shrank so much compared to 4–5 years ago. I heard they are shrinking in London too. My explanation is that being a language/platform with a relatively low barrier to entry, the market has been saturated.

It is still used by a lot of companies and it has beautiful support and community, but I think a Rubyist should definitely learn one of the three technologies listed above.

Some companies have a main Rails app, but use Node to create some microservices around it. Some others use a Rails app as a API backend only (you will be interested in the new Rails 5 API only mode), but then switch to Angular or iOS, or both, for the front-end.

A developer can never stop!

Where is the money?

The highest paying contracts are still the super-niche ones, like cryptocurrency or natural language processing. The more Math is involved, the higher the pay. I think that’s the future.

The backside is that there are not as many offers, for now, and very few of them offer remote work.

I hope this post was useful, and would be interesting to know where you find work at present and what technologies you use.