This is the real answer.

There are still, in the year 2023, Cobal developers graduating and getting hired to work on software.

My alma mater’s website runs on PHP.

The investment to flip even a microservice from one language to another is REALLY high, and most companies won’t pay unless there’s a significant pain point. They might not greenfield new projects with it anymore - but it will still be around effectively forever.

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I think sometimes the difference between strongly typed and loosely typed is easier to explain in terms of workflow. It’s possible (note: not necessarily a good idea, but possible) to start writing a function in vanilla JavaScript without any real idea of what it’s going to output. Is it going to return a string? Is it going to return null, because it’s performing some action to a variable? Or is it going to return that variable? And vanilla JS is good with that.

But that same looseness that can be kind of useful when you’re brainstorming or problem solving can result in unexpected behavior. For instance, I write a function that prepares a string for additional processing. For the purposes of this conversation, let’s say that it removes white spaces and any non-letter or number characters, and then returns the transformed string.

What happens if I feed a number (integer) to this function instead of a string? What about a number with a decimal (float)? Does my function (and/or JavaScript) treat them as literal strings? Does it remove the decimal from the float, since it’s a non-letter, non-number value?

Without Typescript, you have to either a) write your code in such a way that you ensure that the situation never comes up (i.e. by validating inputs, or by being very careful about when and how this function is used), or b) you have to handle those weird cases, which turns a cute little three line function into a 30 line monster with a switch case and typecasting. And truthfully, on any project ‘at scale’ you’re going to have to do both.

With Typescript, you specify that this function takes in a string, and returns a string, and that’s it. Then, when another dev (or you, in six weeks when you’ve forgotten all about this function that you wrote) tries to send in a boolean, or a float, or an array of strings, Typescript is going to blow up. Nope. Can’t do that. And they (it’s more fun to think of it as future you) will have to follow the rules that you put in place by writing the function the way you did, which just means being careful enough to cast a float or integer into a string before passing it, or concatenating an array, or whatever.

Strongly typed languages expect you to write functions with the end state you’re expecting in mind. You’ve already got the solution in your head before you start typing, at least enough to know what type of data goes in and what type of data goes out.

It also hides (but doesn’t totally get rid of!) some of the sillier things that JavaScript does because it’s not strongly typed. True + True should probably never equal 2.

As to OP’s question, though - if you know how to do things in JavaScript (.trim(), for example), then you know how to do a thing in Typescript. Manipulating data in JavasScript and manipulating data in TypeScript is identical - but TypeScript is also watching what the types of the different data types being used, and throwing up the BS flag when you get too loose with what you’re doing (or don’t think through the consequences of your design decisions).

Is it just an extreme difficulty spike at this point that I have to trial-and-error through, or am I doing anything wrong?

I would say this is the biggest ‘aha’ moment for pretty much any developer - the first time you go from “I built this myself” to “A team built this and has supported it for 10+ years”. Not only can a team of three or four write a lot of code in ten years - they’ll optimize the Hell out of it. It’s ten years worth of edge case bugs, attempts to go faster, new features, etc. And it’s ‘bumpy’ because some of it was done by Dev A in their own style, some of it by Dev B, and so on. So you’ll find the most beautiful implementation for problems that you haven’t even considered before next to “Hello World” level implementation on something else.

The biggest thing you can do to help yourself out is make sure you’re clear on their branching strategy. When you’re the only one working on your code, it’s cool to push to main and occasionally break things and no harm no foul. But for a mature code base, a butterfly flapping its wings on that obscure constructor can have a blast radius of ‘okay, we have to rebase to the last stable commit’. When in doubt, ‘feature/(what you’re working on)’; but there might be more requirements than that, and it’s okay to ask. Some teams have feature requests tracked by number, on a kanban board, some put it in their username, etc.

Get the code pulled down, get it running on your machine (no small task), git checkout -b from wherever you’re pulling a branch off of (hopefully main or master, but again, it’s okay to ask) and then, figure out what the team’s requirements are for PRs. Do they have any testing environments, besides building it locally? Do they use linting or some other process to enforce style on PR reviews?

And then…don’t move a button. (Unless that button actually needs moved!) But try to mimic something that already exists. Create a second button in the new location. Steal from the codebase - implement something small in a way that has been done before. After the new button works - then remove the old button and see what happens.

The longer you deal with a codebase (and the attendant issues and feedback) the more you’ll feel yourself drawn to certain parts of the code that you’re familiar with.

Anyway, hope that advice helps! But most of all, don’t be scared. You will break things unintentionally. Your code will break things. If there’s not a process in place to catch it before it happens, that’s not your fault; that’s the senior dev/owners fault. But do try to limit the damage by using good branching strategies, only PRing after linting/testing, and otherwise following the rules.

The most compelling argument I heard is that WASM can’t manipulate the DOM and a lot of people don’t want to deal with gluing JS code to it, but aside from that

But other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?

You’ve gotten several other answers that are true and correct - the pain of implementation at this point is greater than the pain points that WASM solves. But this is also a non trivial one - most of what Javascript should be doing on a webpage is DOM manipulation.

At some point, WASM will either come out with a killer feature/killer app/use case that Javascript (and all the libraries/frameworks out there) hasn’t figured out how to handle, and it will establish a niche (besides “Javascript is sort of a dumb language let’s get rid of it”), and depending on the use case, you might see some of the 17.4 million (estimated) Javascript developers chuck it for…what? Rust? Kotlin? C? C#? But the switching costs are non-trivial - and frankly, especially if you still have to write Javascript in order to manipulate the DOM…well, what are we solving for?

If you’re writing a web app where one of the WASM languages gives you a real competitive advantage, I’d say that’s your use case right there. But since most web applications are basically strings of api calls looped together to dump data from the backend into a browser, it’s hard to picture wider adoption. I’ve been wrong before, though.

For a second I thought my github was going viral. ;)

This is a hilarious (and interesting!) read.

As a young(er) and slightly shittier web developer, before I really understood or could implement promises effectively (or when my code would ‘race’ and fail to recognize that the DOM hadn’t been loaded yet, so I couldn’t attach event listeners yet), I was known to implement a 2 second timeout.

It wasn’t pretty, but it worked!

I’m a web dev turned DevOps (with the front end design eye and CSS knowledge of a DevOps! Lol) but this seems like a great place to use a css grid, no?

Junior-ish DevOps with some blue/green experience.

It’s a very thorny problem, and I think your willingness to put up with the trade offs really would drive what patttern of architectecture.

Most of our blue/green deployment types use a unitary database behind the backend infra. There’s a lot ways to implement changes to the database (mostly done through scripting in the pipeline, we don’t typically use hibernate or other functionality that wants to control the schema more directly), and it avoids the pain of trying to manage consistency with multiple db instances. It helps that most of our databases are document types, so a lot of db changes can be implemented via flag. But I’ve seen some SQL implementations for table changes that lend themselves to blue/green - you just have to be very mindful to not Bork the current live app with what you’re doing in the background. It requires some planning - not just “shove the script into source control and fire the pipeline.”

If we were using SQL with a tightly integrated schema and/or we couldn’t feature flag, I think we’d have to monkey around with blue/greening the database as well. But consistency is non trivial, especially depending on what kind of app it is. And at least one time when a colleague set up a database stream between AWS accounts, he managed a circular dependency, which….well it wasn’t prod so it wasn’t a big deal, but it easily could’ve been. The data transfer fees are really what kills you. We managed to triple our Dev AWS bill prototyping some database streams at one point. Some of it undoubtedly was inefficient code, but point stands. With most blue/green infra, your actual costs are a lot less than 2x what a ‘unitary’ infra would cost, because most infra is pay for use and isn’t necessary except when you go to deploy new code anyway. But database consistency, at least when we tried it, was way MORE expensive than just 2x the cost of a unitary db, because of the compute and transfer fees.

So glad I Xited right after Musk’s purchase was finalized. My days are freer and my conscience is clear!

I watched it in Vim, mostly because I don’t hate myself enough.

Not to spoil the ending either, but the nuclear device goes off because Oppenheimer smashes a bunch of keys and then finally remembers :wq.

Maybe this is because I’m still relatively junior (2ish years), but my favorite question to ask is, “What are some of the characteristics you’re looking for in someone in this role?”

I use it as a vibe check, especially at the end of interviews. If they start reading my resume back to me, or listing the things we’ve talked about during the interview…well, that’s a good sign. If they start describing a bunch of stuff that we didn’t talk about, it’s a chance to throw a ‘Hail Mary’ pass and show them how that’s me, as well - maybe we didn’t talk about something that was important to them, but I have relevant experience or a background.

If they start describing somebody else…well, that’s not great.

This was my first thought.

I do this for a living and it’s literally built into Linux.

Set their permissions carefully, ensure that the permission set does what you want (and not a bunch of stuff you don’t want), and keep on keeping on.

I hated everything about this comment, thanks.

I have some experience using git and svn, but really never work in collaboration with others, in my current work we used but only git without external service. Just to keep track of the personal work.

No this is great in and of itself - what I would tell you is to treat your github projects, even if you’re the sole contributor, like you’re working on a team. Checkout a feature branch, complete your code, then PR it into main/master/release/whatever, even if you’re the one doing the code review for yourself. Even if you don’t get to experience other devs (inevitably borking what you’re working on) in the codebase at the same time, it’ll give you a better idea of what the workflow should look like.

I have a “software engineer” job in a research institution, is only the title because I’m a research assistant most of the time with some dev time. The problem is there is no grow and the founding is through a international project, so the time is fixed.

My pay is not so high, is a EU salary in a semi-public institution, tho the pay is lower that the equivalent in the industry, but I’m above the average of at county level, I’ll consider a paycut at least I could still pay the rent and past time with my family.

This all makes the SRE part more understandable and more within reach. I wouldn’t lead with, “I don’t have any dev experience”; I would lead with “I’ve been a software engineer for x years, specializing in atmospheric modeling.” Whoever is interviewing you will probably dig and figure out that you were a solo developer, but…you were still a software dev, and the first job in this industry is way harder than the next couple. Lean into that - you have the job title, you have the resume, you’re looking to take ‘the next step’ into SRE/DevOps, because as a solo-dev, you had to handle all that stuff yourself, and you figured out that you liked it and were good at it.

We’ve all been the new guy trying to break into the field - pay it forward after you land that first SRE gig.

This kind of implies that you’re crunching and then ‘recovering’. That may or may not be something you have any control over - there’s a lot that goes into creating an unsustainable ‘sprint’, and probably 99.8% of it is not related to actual developers or code - but ideally you would be using these ‘lulls’ to try to pull stuff out of the next crunch so maybe it won’t hurt so bad.

In reality, if I’m coming off of a bad crunch, I do anything I can do to avoid burnout. Sometimes that’s ‘fun’ backlog items or research for future features or something else I’m excited about, sometimes it’s studying for certs, sometimes it’s cutting slack (@[email protected] watching Netflix feels familiar!). But again - whatever it takes to recharge my batteries and feel less bitter and shitty.

The most ‘sure’ sign that I’m coming off a crunch, though, is that I start reinforcing work/life boundaries. “It’s 5p and I’m logging off and I’m not going to think about work shit willingly until tomorrow.”

I think you have an interesting background and potentially interesting technical skills, and I could totally see you catching on with someone and having a fantastic career. I could also see why it would be a weird or awkward fit, that you might be totally overwhelmed, and possibly even hate it. Let me qualify my answer(s) and see if that helps at all.

I feel like at its heart, being a DevOps is just being passionate about tinkering and technology. The best DevOps Engineers I know love nothing more than to nerd out about…well, all kinds of stuff. From K8s to Linux distros to build tools to code. DevOps is a practice, not a skill set - and that’s reflected in the fact that there’s no ‘base’ skill set for DevOps Engineers. I’ve known developers, sysadmins, even help desk type folks that found their way into the field and were successful. It just depends.

It kind of feels like you have the heart of a tinkerer, and the fact that you have a MS in a hard science suggests that you have the brainpower to hack it - maybe literally. :)

That said - what would worry me if I were considering hiring you is that you don’t really have any exposure to Software Development Lifecycle concepts. Maybe I’m too stupid to understand all the acronyms above, but in my (limited) experience, having a good handle on SDLC is sort of the beating heart of DevOps - at least in part because being able to have the infrastructure ready to mate up with the code at the right time and right place is like, 80% of my gig. Too early is a security vulnerability (potentially), too late and the dev team misses all their sprint targets. You don’t have to write code, exactly (although I wish I wrote more), but you have to be able to ‘follow along’ with the dev team. Especially when you’re troubleshooting.

For SRE particularly - you have a lot of nice sysadmin-y type background skills, but particularly understanding design patterns and telemetry would be the thing I’d be most nervous about for you. Scalability as well - although that’s hard for almost everybody. But for an SRE to improve reliability, you have to be able to really hone in on what’s breaking - and once you’ve gotten the big pieces sorted, being able to understand resource usage, and all of that points towards good instrumentation (and good instrumentation practices).

I joke that reading logs is my superpower - both because my devs, bless them, don’t do it, and also because if we’ve done a good job building the application, build/deploy pipelines, and infrastructure, your alerts and instrumentation will tell you exactly where any pain points are happening, and make it a lot easier to figure out where and how to focus your efforts moving forward.

So, after that wall of text - I’d point you towards the cloud. AWS is the largest/most widely known, but arguably kind of opinionated in terms of implementation. Still, AWS Solutions Architect is a pretty good ‘gold standard’ type certification. If you’re more familiar with GCP or Azure, do the ‘associate’ level certs there.

Another obvious thing that I didn’t see in your background - VCS. Git gud, as it were. I’m a big fan of hanging pretty much all your personal projects on GitHub. Mine is atrocious since I got hired, but before that I had a full year straight of commits. Sometimes it was impressive stuff, most of the time it was just messing around with code - but all the companies that gave me an offer letter mentioned it. Ymmv.

Finally - you might expand your search a little wider (SysOps instead of SRE off the bat? DevOps as well? Maybe going straight stick software dev, with your background, at a company where your science background would be a real value add is something to look at) and also be prepared to ‘take a step back’ if you do jump. I’d definitely hire you to see how things go, but I’d want you to come in as a Junior, and based on what you wrote above, that’s probably a bit of a paycut for you.

TL;DR - Do cloud certs, practice on GitHub so employers can see what you’re working on, consider SysOps/DevOps as well as SRE.

Best of luck to you!