Could I get some opinions?
I've been working for around 4 years now but I feel like I've become a bit of a
jack of all trades but master of none. I'm wanting to invest more time into specialising
in something but I'm not 100% sure what is the best way forward.
I do both back and front end in both C# and PHP. I work on Wordpress, Magento and Bespoke .NET systems.
I originally started out as a back end developer while I was still in college but as my current company ran into some hard
times where we had no front end developers, I stepped up to take over that role. In doing so I have begun really enjoying
working with front end technologies and have learnt a lot about UX along the way. I just dont feel any excitement for .NET or PHP anymore.
I feel like specialising in front end is the right way to go and to do a little bit of back end as needed here and there but
I worry that as someone who is useless so far as creating designs goes that it wouldn't be good in the long run.
Perhaps it's just my company that expects you to know everything. I have been told by other senior devs who have passed through in my time
that the way the company does things is really bad and that they take advantage of their devs.
I haven't worked for any other companies but all of the other devs I know damn near have a heart attack when I talk about my task list for the
week. I would move companies but I'm planning on moving overseas in about 2 years time so I want to use that time to learn as much as I can.
I suppose my question is really what should I learn that would put me in the best position so far as finding a good job and being a good base to build from. I would like to learn a JS framework as well but there are so many and they change completely every year so I dont know which one would be a good place to start.
I've just started looking into bootstrap and have a bespoke CMS to write in the coming weeks with it and SASS. Thats going to be an interesting experience.
I mentioned before that I was planning on moving overseas. I currently live in South Africa where most things super dodge but I'm really keen on New Zealand. I've done a lot of research into other countries including America and England but its just not the lifestyle im looking for.
I've been trying to figure out if they have commonly used frameworks but it seems like its a bit of mixed bag.
My current skill set includes:
- Making Coffee ( just joking haha ).
- Creating custom back end controls using either C# or PHP.
- Building of HTML templates based on designs.
- Testing sites
- Content population across multiple sites on a wide variety of CMS's. (bespoke .net cms, wordpress, magento, joomla, classic asp, silverstripe, plain html pages.)
- Training clients in how to use their sites.
- Providing accurate timings on projects.
- Building and managing email campaigns for clients through Dynamail, Contactology, Campaigner and MailChimp.
- Creating custom templates that work across a wide range of email clients used in MailChimp which allows for our clients to create and manage their own mails.
- Building Wordpress blogs and themes from scratch based on designs from our designer.
- Creating themes for Wordpress and Magento.
- Modifying the front end of various CMS's such as Wordpress, Magento, Drupal 8, Joomla and bespoke .Net CMS's.
- CSS, SASS, LESS
- Custom responsive HTML without using a framework
- Bootstrap, Semantic UI
- Javascript and jQuery
- Managing my own projects
- fluent nhibernate
- Optimizing old code using new technology
- Ensuring a good User Experience on our sites.
- Slicing up designs using Adobe Fireworks.
- Agile working environment
- Tortoise SVN