The Problem

Up on my wall I have a number of projects that I’ve been keen to work on for quite some time.  Ideas that I have, and shelve, and that resurface every now and again when something triggers the memory (or I’m day dreaming just looking at the board).  Some of them I end up binning as having been done but, more often than not, they don’t get started because I’m hampered by Decision Paralysis.

Decision Paralysis

This can take many forms: “which project do I start first?”; “will there be anything worthwhile that comes out of this?”; “is this project more useful to me than that one?”; and most common of all “what’s my development stack going to be?“.

It’s that last one that really holds things up. So much choice for each facet of development, which should you choose.  There’s no definitive answer out there so a jobserve search seems like a sensible way to go about working out what’s currently in demand, and making sure you know your onions about the on-trend technologies.

Doing the above you will see job adverts containing laundry lists of minimum requirements for the post.  I remember from being the other side of the desk that frequently they are often “would be nice if” but are frequently listed under essentials as, hey! we’ll maybe need that at some point on some project.  The best indication of whether they are actually required seems to be salary or day rate.  I’ve seen near identical jobserve posts, in similar industries, with a 30k disparity in salary! Maybe both of them did require that level of expertise but one company just had no idea about current market rates. Who knows?

The Decision

Looking at the numbers, it seems that a dev stack of node.js/backbone/underscore and jQuery are the darlings of the job advert these days. I’ve got to say that having worked with javascript and it’s variants for most of my “web life” there’s more than a minor appeal to doing everything front-to-back in the same language – there seems a wide range of helper tools out there as well. So now, to work! Next post - Sweeper App.