Seeking advice - Diversify?
TC - $90 per hour. YOE - 16 in java, includes 9 in Android, 13 of those in US as an H-1B immigrant consultant. Started career as an oldschool web developer in JEE (Servlets, JSP, Struts, Spring, Hibernate, ejbs, JMS, Oracle Application Server, Apache Tomcat, IBM Websphere, BEA Weblogic etc, Sun Microsystems Certifications for Web Component and Business Component Developer) for the first 7 years. Then Android chose me, and ever since, been on-and-off with different industry domains (Investment Banking real-time trade platform vs audio/video media-rendering apps). Given my status as a H-1B Immigrant Consultant, I have almost always had it tough to break into a Full Time Employment in interviews, and have been more-or-less stuck with an Individual-Contributor code-monkey role. I am now sick-and-tired of UI, the ever changing landscape of Android APIs, practices, tech, emerging paradigms (React and Flutter) etc, and hoping to break-open and diversify into Cloud apps. As I learn, Cloud is primarily Dev Ops focused (what particular product-suite, tool-chain) within AWS, Azure, GCP will work best for the nature of the Service / Application being deployed, aka Cloud Formation, that is probably more suitable for oldschool server admins?, and the real hands-on programmed app (micro-service, middle-ware apps). What should I focus on, and where do I begin self-learning?
Learn Node and TypeScript
You for certain? Isn't Node JS-server spun-up as a component of the Cloud-Formation? Is anybody even using Node above-and-beyond npm? As for Typescript, which is more or less the more granular fundamentals of JS, are micro-services and middle-ware apps even using it, rather than primarily JVM based relatively higher-order languages such as Scala and Kotlin, relying primarily on Spring-boot? Even so, could you suggest where should I begin a self-learning?
There are a lot of micro services run on Node. Use TypeScript (transpired to JavaScript) there as well as in an Angular web UI. Deploy to Heroku, connect to Mongo and you have a modern app
How many hours do you work in a month. Android developers are always in demand from what I see and so are UI developers , is your concern more to be full time or are you interested in changing your skill sets because you are bored and not challenged. You might have to prioritize based on what’s important for you and your family
no family, single here, that's an entirely another failure story. i just want be employable, preferably FTE, preferably more responsible roles than Individual Contributor (code-monkey), preferably Big-N, but the last preference needs time, effort, dedication, that I plan to put-in in coming months.
CVS often converts H1B to FTE even for management roles. I don’t recommend the company in general but for immigration situations they are pretty good