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.

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.

Good advice already in this thread, but I’d add: ask smart questions, and when you’re engaging with a senior/mentor, build the picture for them. Everyone (including your mentor) expects you to have questions - they want you to ask questions, rather than just spinning your wheels for days and days. But they also want to know what you’ve tried and what you’ve looked at for resources. And despite appearances, they don’t always have the entire code base committed to memory. :)

For instance - suppose you’d been asked to, using the UI, return a piece of information from an external API and display it within the UI.

Bad question: “Hey, so I tried to integrate that third party API, but I’m not getting a return.”

“Okay - what kind of code are you getting? And what do the docs say?”

🤷‍♂️

Good question: “Hey, so I tried to integrate that third party API, but the return I’m getting from it is a 401 error. That should be an authentication error - but just in case, I pinged their server from our server, and they can reach each other. The documentation says that I have to use our key to get a JWT, but hitting the endpoint it says gives me a 401 error. I double checked our token; I’ve got the right one. And I’m sending it in the header as ‘auth’ like the documentation says. Where else should I look?”

“Oh yeah, that’s a tricky one - you have to encode the token before you send it; let me see if I’ve got an example where you can see what that looks like…”

One of the things that will happen over time, based on the questions that more senior SDEs ask, you’ll be able to ‘rubber ducky’ problem solve by asking yourself the questions that they would usually ask you, and it’s shockingly effective to help you sort your own problems out and clear your own blockers.

You know what I don’t like about them? They’re kind of a symbol of American arrogance and bullying.

It’s only useful where there is zero AAA and zero threat from enemy fighters. It’s a cargo plane - it packs a wallop, of course, but you use it when “the other guy” is a bunch of dudes running around on the ground with no chance to fight back.

The fact that we have them in inventory says a LOT about the types of wars we’ve been fighting for the past 40 years.

(Super unpopular opinion - the A-10 is not much better, but at least it has some genuine anti-armor capabilities.)

2+ YOE as DevOps, looking for Software Dev and DevOps-y roles since, say, February.

Not really looking, per se, but was listening and responding to head hunters and treating it as a learning experience and maybe some leverage to get a pay bump - I’m classed as a junior but run rings around the mid-career and seniors we’ve hired recently, who all make more than me.

Anyway, I had a ton of interviews (probably 15 or so), several next rounds (maybe 5?), but no actual offers and nothing that would make me move through about May, and then….everything just went radio silent.

I almost posted this week to ask if I was doing something wrong or the market was that hard right now.