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?

4th February 2012

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.