Learning Java, not JS
When I was 14 years old, I started learning Java. I had to use it for 3 years for school. I haven’t used it since. Then I went dark on programming and had a whole different technical education and career for more than a decade.
I started programming professionally 3–4 years ago. Like most people starting in anything like recent history I’ve been steeped in JavaScript and its server and client derivatives.
Funny thing happened, though. I found myself job searching recently and I’m quite confident with where my resume is at, and I’ve been excited to have those conversations and field offers. But a weird percentage of my inbound leads start with, “Hey Ryan, these people are looking for a Java developer [who also does all the things you do].”
So with fresh eyes, I opened some tutorials and courses and started going through the “Hello, World!” motions. I learned the basics about the history of Java and the problems its community had been solving well for 20 years.
Then I watched a video of a guy defining one function in the Spring framework and then creating about 6 accompanying files that did next to nothing and engaging multiple IDE modals and checking boxes associated with really unintuitive concepts and I was turned off again. The magic of system agnostic bytecode was lost on me and I departed from this errand.
See you in 15 more years when the disgust from this run in has worn off, Java.
