Answered: “What are your thoughts on specializing on the JS ecosystem?”

Here’s my answer to the question above from a post on Reddit:

As always, there are pros and cons to specialising vs generalising. As has already been mentioned in this thread, if you specialise you will typically be able to earn more money. On the other hand, you are potentially at risk if the technologies in which you specialise lose favour.

If you generalise, you’ll have a broader range of job options but you won’t necessarily be looked at for positions where the employer prefers a specialist.

In general terms of programming careers, while technologies typically change quickly in some ways every year, there are also many aspects that haven’t changed much in decades. OOP principles and design patterns (to a lesser extent than the former) are two examples. With this in mind, you’ll only be doing yourself a favour by at least regularly playing around with different programming languages and stacks to keep your thinking relatively fresh and stay abreast of what’s happening in the industry while sharpening up on more stable tech. Even if you specialise, it doesn’t hurt to know of different ways of doing things. The more you do this, the more you’ll see evidence of our forebears having borrowed ideas from each other because they did the same thing. This is good for all of us.

Visual Studio Extensions: How to get colors from the VS theme

TL;DR:

// Note that I've only tried this in VS 2022.
// Browse the EnvironmentColors class to see all the available colors.
var themeColor = VSColorTheme.GetThemedColor(EnvironmentColors.ToolWindowBackgroundColorKey);
// If you want to use this in a WPF brush, convert it like this.
var wpfCompatibleColor = Color.FromRgb(themeColor.R, themeColor.G, themeColor.B);

Read on for full details.

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How to be a Great Remote Teammate

turned off laptop computer

Working from home is nothing new, especially for those of us in the technology business. Since the COVID pandemic, however, many companies were forced to jump into the deep end of remote work. Thankfully, it seems to have been a positive experience for most.

Employers realised that their employees’ productivity isn’t reliant on their managers lurking around them and peering over their shoulders to make sure they could see a text editor rather than Facebook on the screen. Employees realised that it’s quite nice to be able to fully control your physical working environment and interruptions. It’s not everyone’s preference, however, and that’s fine too. Some people need more in-person contact with their colleagues in order to do their best work.

The whole arrangement isn’t without its quirks.

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