Simon Willison’s Weblog

How long until Ruby developers are as cheap as PHP developers? is it already happening? should I still learn it or it only has a couple years left and I’m better off with SSJS?

My answer to How long until Ruby developers are as cheap as PHP developers? is it already happening? should I still learn it or it only has a couple years left and I’m better off with SSJS? on Quora

If you want to be a highly paid engineer, you should worry less about your expertise in a specific language and more about developing broad and deep skills across a wider range of development topics.

- Have you used Redis, MongoDB, Riak and/or Cassandra?
- Can you set up and make use of a Continuous Integration server like Jenkins?
- Do you understand TDD, BDD and other testing techniques?
- How’s your HTTP? Do you understand REST, caching headers, URL design, content negotiation, SPDY, WebSockets?
- Are you familiar with message queues, pubsub, zeromq?
- Do you understand basic web app security? XSS, CSRF, clickjacking, OWASP, escape-by-default templating?
- Do you know what’s involved in client-side web performance optimisation (Steve Souders’ High Performance Web Sites stuff)?

All of the above are, in my opinion, important skills for a senior web engineer. None of them are any different if you are using PHP, Ruby, Python or something else.