What development languages do you use?

[Nicole Sim]

Hi guys,

My name is Nicole and I am new to this group. I am currently in the early stages of building an academy (www.yotcopi.com) that focuses on teaching web and mobile app development. The academy aims to provide a software development education to those who currently cannot afford to pursue a higher education in Singapore.

As part of an effort to shape the curriculum to the needs of the industry, I would like to poll tech startup entrepreneurs on here to find out a little bit more about:

1) the languages you use for coding in your company,

2) the top 3 languages you would like to find in young developers, and for which you think are hard to find competent developers in.

Thank you for your time, and I hope to hear back from you soon. :)

Cheers,

Nicole

[Stéphane Lallée]

Hi Nicole,

The initiative is very nice !

I'm not part of a startup, I'm in research in robotics, but I am disappointed regularly by the coding level in this area. 

However, based on my experience in science the 3 mainstream languages are :

1) C++

2) Python

3) C#

Although this is probably very different in the "web world".

[Meng Weng Wong]

On Mon, Feb 23, 2015 at 9:17 AM, Nicole Sim <nicole...@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi guys,

My name is Nicole and I am new to this group. I am currently in the early stages of building an academy (www.yotcopi.com) that focuses on teaching web and mobile app development. The academy aims to provide a software development education to those who currently cannot afford to pursue a higher education in Singapore.

Sounds good … how does it differentiate from folks like https://generalassemb.ly/education/web-development-immersive ?

As part of an effort to shape the curriculum to the needs of the industry, I would like to poll tech startup entrepreneurs on here to find out a little bit more about:

1) the languages you use for coding in your company,

In my company we use

- Javascript (Google Apps Script, InDesign ExtendScript)

- Perl (as a practical extraction and reporting language to talk to 3rd party APIs such as f6s.com's)

 

2) the top 3 languages you would like to find in young developers, and for which you think are hard to find competent developers in.

I would like to see competency in Python / Ruby / Perl so they can get things done effectively. Why those languages? Because those are popular – https://aws.amazon.com/code has sample libraries in those languages. Java too. Some of the best programmers I know are Java experts.

PHP is OK but has a bit of a stigma IMHO.

Haskell and Erlang would be great to see on a resume. They suggest that the person is a born sorceror, not just a petty magician. In other words, a real computer scientist and software engineer, not just a web monkey.

[Meng Weng Wong]

On Tue, Feb 24, 2015 at 11:16 AM, Meng Weng Wong <meng...@gmail.com> wrote:

2) the top 3 languages you would like to find in young developers, and for which you think are hard to find competent developers in.

Sorry, I should have said:

In addition to Javascript which has become the language of the web and increasingly the backend as well thanks to Node,

[Martin]

We are building web apps with the Django web-framework and therefore, we are using Python and Javascript. If I would have more time, I would love to look into Go because I see *a lot* of super awesome stuff being created in Go recently and deploying Go applications seems to be insanely easy (just copy the binaries to a server and you are done).

Cheers,

Martin

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[Gibson Tang]

We are a mobile dev house. So we do C++, Obj-C, Java, C#, PHP for mobile and web

[Michał J Gajda]

Hi
Haskell, SQL, Python.

It may be difficult to find programmers with strong background, but competency always rewards.
--
best
Michal

[Mats Engstrom]

I head the development for a company in Thailand, we're doing new development and maintenance of or legacy apps in C, PHP, node.js, C# and medium complexity SQL (new dev), for the legacy stuff we're doing VB6, C#, PHP, complex SQL.

PHP and C# people are rather easy to find.   Competent C guys are quite scarce. node.js is also hard to find, but if you're having experience with generic javascript and also are a real programmer node is not hard to pick up.  People having a deeper understanding of SQL, above standard queries perhaps with a left join, are also hard to find.

So if I could have a wish list for training it would be SQL and node.js (backend non-webserver stuff)

-mats

[Frenchie]

Hard to restrict it to 3, as I work with a few startups. Most startups starting out these days commonly pick something like:

Server side:

• Ruby on Rails, or
  
• NodeJS

Client side: 

• HTML (or markup languages like Jade)
  
• CSS (or markup, like SASS or LESS)
  
• Javascript (or markup like CoffeeScript)
  

Mobile: while there's the option of going with something like Apache Cordova, you get much better control from native code (Objective C/Swift for iOS, Java for Android) 

Equally as important are tooling & Ops however, as these factor a large part in to web dev (and incidentally, also is where a lot of current online academies fall down)

Tooling:

• git & a deployment flow model, like git-flow
• bundler or NPM
• Grunt or Gulp
• Test Driven Development & frameworks (eg: Rspec for ruby , Mocha for Node)

Ops:

• Databases
• SQL variants
• MongoDB
• Hosting environments
• AWS
• Digital Ocean
• Heroku
• Automated/Intergrated hosting (eg: Cloud66, Modulus.io, etc)
• Continuous integration
• Jenkins
• Buildkite for smarter automation
• Monitoring
• New Relic
• Mixpanel/KISSMetrics

That's just a short list, and I'm a little tired, so I may have missed some stuff.

Cheers,

Frenchie

[Paul Gallagher]

On Thu, Feb 26, 2015 at 12:21 AM, Frenchie <s...@frenchie.com.au> wrote:

Equally as important are tooling & Ops however, as these factor a large part in to web dev (and incidentally, also is where a lot of current online academies fall down)

+1

Just learning a language doesn't begin to scratch the surface of what it takes to become a productive member of a development team, especially in a startup where you are more likely to have to share hats than in a nice big enterprise group.

But there's no escape. Everyone needs to start somewhere. The GitHub language statistics is I think one of the best guides to what is really used & in demand. It makes sense:

• Javascript is king. Everyone needs to know it these days (to some extent or other). It's pretty unavoidable;-) Add node, and you can do amazing full stack things with it too.
• Java - yes it's big. It's crowded. The only reason I'd see learning java as a career positive these days is if you wanted to do mobile dev (Android) or get an enterprise job.
• Python, PHP and Ruby. Pick one. Personally I'd plum for Ruby, because I think you learn better code hygiene and also because supply falls so far short of demand. But Python is also OK and perhaps a "safer" career call;-) And when someone tells me they *don't* know PHP, I sigh with relief, imagining all those bad habits they won't need to unlearn;-) 

However the GitHub stats (I suspect) are skewed towards server-side/web development. Simply because it seems less likely for mobile developers to release as much open source. That does seem to be the key decision a developer needs to make when entering the field and perhaps aiming for a startup job: does she/he want to head down a web dev, or mobile path?

Yet another short course in a specific language or framework doesn't sound very compelling. There are many (often free) sources and courses available already if you care to google.

What I think would be Quite Interesting and stand out from the crowd is something like this (i.e. "everything I wish someone told me before I started this crazy stuff and had to figure out for myself"): 

How to Be a Web Developer in a Startup 101

• learn how to learn a new language/framework
• learn how to build a complete web app with django, rails or node
• learn how to find/add/use a library/gem/egg
• learn how and why to write tests, and even do some TDD
• take a brief look at how to build the same app with a second framework (django, rails, node)
• learn enough javascript and HTML/CSS to make the app look good and work well (specifically: jQuery and a framework like bootstrap)
  
• learn how to deploy, monitor and manage your app on heroku/AWS/...
• learn good versioning habits with git
• learn how to build a gem or egg
• learn how to open source your gem or egg on GitHub
• learn a bit about what a UX designer does. Or just read "Don't Make me Think!"
• learn a bit about how work really gets done in a team: learn Scrum basics.
• learn a bit about how startups think. Or just read "Lean Startup".

How to Be a Mobile Developer in a Startup 101

• pretty much all the above, except substitute the web frameworks with:
• learn how to build a mobile app with XCode or Android Studio
• take a brief look at how to build the same app for the other platform
  
• learn how to release your app on the App/PlayStore

These sound a bit like "bootcamp" programmes. And probably come with the same caveats - some years ago, my company ran bootcamps to cross-train people into development. I think we provided that it really takes attitude & aptitude to succeed; 12 months out, 20% max had stayed in development, most moving back out of the industry or into very different roles. 

PS:

• suggest use a survey tool to take a survey
• suggest properly open source some of your software to demonstrate that you know what you are talking about when it comes to modern development practices
• suggest get your home page updated so it is not pre-announcing software that is already late, and course registration opening in February?

Cheers,

Paul

[Robert Sim]

Just started working here (fresh grad) I am coding away in PHP and Javascript for a project I am doing in-house. On the side, I am learning R.