How far behind are we? How do we catch up?

Tanner R — Sun, 17 Nov 2019 16:55:37 +0000

Hello everyone!

My name is Tanner, and I am a .NET and JS developer. I work for a fairly large company where I develop primarily internal business applications.

I'm writing this post because I am hoping to get some feedback from fellow developers on my current situation.

First, let me explain a bit about our environment, then get on with my overall question. As it exists today, we have a .NET API and an ASP.NET MVC front-end. We setup MVC pages and use Bootstrap, vanilla JavaScript and JQuery to do everything. We do not use any frameworks or other libraries (outside of some basic charts/grids/etc...). All of our pages are essentially coded once and forgotten about. Almost nothing is reusable. The closest we come to re-usability is a master JS file with some common function calls that we use in multiple places.

So, this means that we do not use ES6, linters, or any package managers. Basically, as soon as we get past simple UI setups, we start venturing into JQuery spaghetti code.

As a young developer, I look around and see all of these cool advancements in JS and front-end development. I feel like we are in the stone age. I feel like everything is a complete mess, and we are just adding to that mess every day.

My question is this. Are we in the stone age? How can we begin to get out of what I see to be a mess?

I am interested in moving towards something like Vue or React, as that will at least get us into the modern era where can at least start doing things with npm, and various libraries etc... However, I am the most junior on our team, and I feel like this will be a huge leap for our team.

Is there any way to help smooth the transition, or to gradually start improving things for a team that is primarily familiar with Microsoft technologies, and are not well versed in JS?

I apologize if this post is too broad. As I said, I am the youngest developer on our team, I see a bunch of problems, but I dont know how to start fixing them. I am looking for guidance from more senior developers.

Thanks,
Tanner

Forem: Tanner R

How far behind are we? How do we catch up?