Meteor and/or MEAN Stack

Yeah - it all depends upon what you want to do. If you want to work with proprietary software ie the Microsoft platform then .NET is the direction you should go. Many large corporations are willing to pay for these platforms because they come with support from the business that creates them etc. Opensource is a different story. It also comes with a larger hurdle to get started (you need to invest the time and energy into learning .NET and/or the Microsoft Platform. I'm more interested in small business and business start ups so I'm not really attracted to this option at this point.

Java has been around for a long time and I know there jobs to be had for Java Developers (including but not limited to Android Developers etc). In my opinion this is where the ball was (perhaps where the ball is) but I'm not sure if it is where the ball is going.

There are other back end opensource option like Ruby/Rails and Python/Django etc and plenty of employment in this space as well depending upon where you live and work. Python and Ruby are both attractive to me but they also come with a larger hurdle to overcome (learning an additional language) and they too could be yesterdays news in a couple years.

Front End Development (HTML, CSS and JavaScript) and Responsive Design (Photoshop, Illustrator, Balsamiq etc) is my main focus right now. I have found that if you have some design skills and you have a strong command of the three front end languages you are employable. In most cases employers in my area are looking for some experience with a front end framework like Bootstrap and/or Foundation, some proficiency with a CMS like Wordpress, Joomla or Drupal, a CSS pre-processor language like Sass or LESS, a version control system like GIT and basic command line skills etc. In other words a solid skill set on front end design and development = a job.

Of course having a skill set that goes above and beyond all of that will not hurt. So you can add Angular, Ember, Node, Express, MongoDB and perhaps Meteor.js to the list of desirable skills. Personally I would like to take my front end skills a step further by mastering Vanilla JavaScript and learning full stack JavaScript via MEAN/Meteor etc.

JavaScript is ubiquitous and it has matured as a language. That doesn't mean that it is a solution for everything but it has become robust enough to address many situations that use to require completely different technologies. I think this trend will continue and that becoming a skilled JavaScript Developer is a smart move for the future.

Full stack JS is not necessarily a dead end in the corporate world. Actually I see high demand for ace javascript devs.

I've spent most of 2015 working as a developer for a multinational financial corporation. While most of their infrastructure is built on C# and Java, they have a lot of projects, such as microsites, internal tools, etc that are built with more flexible open source systems, such as WordPress for content management and MEAN for single page apps. The business group I'm in has standardized on Angular 1.x. Some high profile projects use Ember.

Personally I'd like to see a tutorial of Meteor. I think covering MEAN stack is hard and is a huge topic. Maybe focusing on Express.js along with Node.js can be covered. Angular.js on its own is a big topic to cover.

My understanding is that Meteor essentially does the same thing as a MEAN stack but it uses a single api (so it is more straightforward than learning multiple apis). With that said Full Stack JavaScript sounds like the shortest distance between two points (me getting a web developer job) and it seem to be the direction that a considerable portion of the developer community is taking (so I am not on my own in this way of thinking). The fact that it is a big topic is not so scary if it is broken down into smaller digestible pieces. My question and concern is should we expect to get those pieces and will be be shown how to put them all together in a unified and comprehensive whole.