I have had the privilege to have worked for some amazing companies through my years as a developer, especially while contracting. The spark that got me motivated was learning new languages that would help me build solutions even more rapidly and simply than the previous.
The reasons for this post is wanting to share my views on how businesses need to become more agile and adventurous when choosing a programming language or framework to build your next project.
Don’t just stick with one language or architecture, even if that’s all your developers know. Trust me that productivity in building solutions in another tool, framework or language will be very positive as developers love to learn new skills and not be stuck in a rut using just one.
I used to be a pure .net developer at one point in my carrier and it was just a motivational killer moving from one project to the next using the same framework and C#.
Later on I had the opportunity to work for a company that allowed the flexibility of choosing a platform that suited the project. For example we needed an in house solution developed quickly after the disaster with a software house. After some research and experience testing RAD tools, I finally decided on a platform developed by a French company PCSoft, called WinDev. It’s rich programming language and development tools allowed the solution to be built and released in only a month. With full integration to their accounting system.
The next project was developed with NodeJS and Mongo using MeteorJS. It was enlightening at the time to build a web app solution using only JavaScript and have the power of reactive data using Publish / Subscribe. To this day I still enjoy using Meteor and I learned a lot about JavaScript and asncy in that and subsequent projects.
I don’t use a language or framework in a business project until have have a very good understanding of its capabilities, structure and built a few mini projects. For example I have been intrigued with Elixer at the moment so I guess you could say like you have to “do the knowledge” to become a London black cab driver, I need to do the same to hit the road running with Elixer and the Phoenix Framework.
It’s so important a business that has developers, to embrace new and emerging technologies. Do not call into the trap of sticking to one language just because it’s safe and that’s all your decelooers know. Push your developers to learn other technologies, even if they are low code solutions as change will spark their interest. Listen to them and find out what languages they would love to learn. Maybe it’s flutter as they want to create a mobile version of one of your apps.
Embrace change and llowmot to grow within your developers.