If you're looking for something dead simple, I'd suggest Mithril. The API is tiny, but powerful, and will give you the tools you need to create reactive views that update to state changes.
The major downside to using highly unopinionated frameworks like Mithril is that the burden of project organization is on you. But since this is a personal project that you can use to learn FE development, I think it would be a good fit.
This is a tough question to answer. What constitutes "back end" has changed significantly over the last 5-10 years - an Amazon AWS infrastructure engineer does vastly different day to day work from a small startup engineer.
For you specifically, I'd recommend picking up a web development framework like Ruby on Rails. It will teach you every aspect of building websites: Interacting with databases, writing server endpoints, creating front end web pages, user authentication, deployment, and probably version control. I would consider all of these things to be the bread and butter of typical "back end" engineers (except for maybe the front end stuff.)
From there, you can broaden your knowledge in any direction that interests you. If you like building interactive applications, you can look into front end frameworks like React or Vue. If you want to focus more on back end, you can learn more about relational databases (Head First SQL is a great beginner resource.) Lots of directions you can go.
Agreed, for me learning Django covered a very broad area with and pointed me in the right direction regarding best practices. Deploying it is difficult enough that you will need to learn a about servers (its not desperately difficult but you will need to understand various things to get it running). I would suggest making a point of learning SQL properly understanding how to optimize queries.
- which works fine. I never knew an easy way of doing that, much obliged. No more straining to read super-light grey. (Maybe better to change them to some other colour instead, like red.)
[0] i.e. I made a browser bookmark named 'ungrey' with that javascript as the 'URL', and dragged it to bookmark bar.
Is Sublime Text already uncool? I'll open another editor if I feel like I need a power feature that's not available, but for general everyday coding it's still my go-to.
Beyond that, any Unix environment is fine with me.
I generally don't recommend EPI for interview prep. I've found that the questions are overtuned in difficulty, and don't resemble anything I've seen at even my Google, Facebook, etc. interviews.
I echo what the other poster said - Interview Cake, LeetCode, and CTCI.
I've never had to pay for transportation to an interview - even rideshare/cabs are typically paid for. I would outright reject any company that tried to make me pay for my own airfare and lodging for an onsite interview.
This reminds me of a court case a decade ago when Blizzard sued the creator of a popular World of Warcraft botting program called MMOGlider on the grounds of copyright infringement. Blizzard won and was awarded $6m. Not a lawyer, but maybe there's some legal precedent?
That may help Golden Modz - in the appeal, the Ninth Circuit said it wasn't copyright infringement:
Were we to hold otherwise, Blizzard or any software copyright holder could designate any disfavored conduct during software use as copyright infringement, by purporting to condition the license on the player's abstention from the disfavored conduct. The rationale would be that because the conduct occurs while the player's computer is copying the software code into RAM in order for it to run, the violation is copyright infringement. This would allow software copyright owners far greater rights than Congress has generally conferred on copyright owners.
The Blizzard argument was that because the license is granted to you only under the EULA, breaking the EULA then becomes copyright infringement. That didn't hold up.
No, what worked for Blizzard was DMCA. Because they had an ineffective "anti cheat" system in place, somehow they found a judge willing to consider a bot evading that a violation of a DMCA copy protection device.
Hmmm, I suppose I objectively agree with some of the points the author made, but as someone who works with protocol buffers daily, those issues never actually come to be problematic in practice. In fact, I have nothing but positive things to say about protocol buffers and find them pleasant to work with. Definitely a step up from sending raw JSON down the wire.
Granted, the application I'm working on is fairly boring/vanilla so maybe I don't feel the pain points that come from going off the beaten path.
Maybe for the benefit of everyone could you elaborate more on your vanilla application. So we can understand the context of why your problem-free experience differs from the author's or others'.
1. Yes. Microsoft is still well respected, so having it on your resume will likely open doors for you in the future.
2. No. Microsoft's compensation is generally below Facebook/Google's compensation packages. Be sure to keep cost of living differences in mind though.
3. I personally value options at $0. Unlike RSUs, which are actual stocks, options' value is derived from the difference between the value at strike and the value at liquidation. You'd have to be extremely lucky for your options to be worth more than the money you could be making at a tech giant.
4. It depends on the climate of the place you're working at. If you think it wouldn't be received negatively, go for it. You're the best judge here.
5. You can try to negotiate (it's always worth trying,) but you'll likely fail. Standard negotiating tactics don't work at tech giants due to the large volume of applications received and number of offers being extended. This is doubly true because you're early in your career, so you don't really have the experience needed to leverage a better offer out of thin air.
My main question is how this offering differs from a UI framework. At first glance, this looks similar to Ionic, Flutter, Cordova, Xamarin, React Native, etc. You're fighting an uphill battle because people these days either want to write native applications or use a JavaScript-to-native framework, so you have to be extremely clear on how your tool is superior or different.
One piece of criticism is that while the technology looks neat, the UI doesn't look professional. You're competing with frameworks that have exceptionally polished UI elements out of the box. If design isn't one of your core competencies, I'd highly recommend hiring (or contracting) a designer to help you build a good looking set of UI components, or at least a good looking demo.
The major downside to using highly unopinionated frameworks like Mithril is that the burden of project organization is on you. But since this is a personal project that you can use to learn FE development, I think it would be a good fit.