Roy Tang

Someone on quora asked:

Does a career in web development become boring and stagnant after 5 years?

I disagree.

The thing about this line of work is that there is always something new to do. If you find yourself doing the same type of work all the time, it might be time to look for a different job/company that can offer you more challenging situations.

I’ve been a web developer since 2004. Over the past five years, most of my projects have brought some new and interesting challenges. Some examples:

• One of my projects had to be ported from a large legacy client/server system under a minimal budget. We had create a converter that would create the boilerplate java code (I work primarily in servlets/JSP) from the source of the legacy PowerBuilder system which was very challenging since C/S program stuff doesn’t always map cleanly to web-based stuff
• Another project had me building a generic workflow engine to support the various modules in a large project. The engine had to cater to the different needs of the modules while remaining flexible enough to accommodate new modules and any configuration changes the clients wanted to support (the project had multiple clients)
• The same project above had us learning about the challenges behind DevOps. The size of the project meant our build and deployment processes had to be revamped otherwise the builds would slow to a crawl (at one point it was taking three or more hours to churn out a build, totally unacceptable at the rate we needed to integrate and verify fixes).
• I was also involved in a project that included a web portal that acted as messaging hub for a number of mobile apps. That meant devising a messaging protocol and format that could efficiently communicate with a large array of clients in real-time.

Web development actually has a lot of scope. It’s true that many web development frameworks are largely the same, but that only makes the basic CRUD work easy. It means the developers need to move on to higher-order problems that are not covered by those frameworks.