Gordon Forsythe

RE: Frameworks (pretty sure this can apply to any language, but I'm writing in reference to a question for PHP )

Use a framework only if you know the framework will cover all of the use cases and possible new features for the application. That being said, without knowing the basics and modern trends of the underlying language, you should NOT use a framework and continue learning the language first.

Personally, I would suggest using a micro-framework instead of one of the large include-everything frameworks as they have a tendency to force extra functionality on you that is usually unnecessary and may slow down your application or limit your abilities to extend it. If you find that a framework makes it difficult to add a new library, then it is not a good framework.

We never needed anyone dedicated to setting up or maintaining Sentry. My small team of developers handled it themselves. The documentation was easy enough to get it set up, and the most important part is deciding who should get notifications. I would highly suggest setting up a slack channel (if you use Slack) and set up the integration to notify there.

I use React because it is well engineered, has a huge community behind it, and allows for modular development (allowing you to handle state management yourself). I've been using React since before 1.0 (or whatever number it was they chose after 0.X). Having said this, I'm not saying other UI libraries are worse. I've barely used the other two big ones.

If using React with a non-trivial application, I heavily recommend using Redux for state management. There is no awful magic or convoluted workflow to Redux (you might not think so when starting on it, but once the light comes on, I hope you'll agree). It's all just loosely coupled state management. Remember to export your connected components separately so you can unit test the component without redux.

Everything below is personal opinion.

Personally, I do not believe you should tightly couple front & back ends, or particular frameworks (both front & back-end).

Learn the underlying language(s) and use modern practices with them. This is much more important than learning a framework, as the framework will eventually be something you utilize instead of being a crutch. Find a local developer group/slack/discord and ask for suggestions on where to learn from. Pay more attention to official language documentation than stackoverflow when looking for language-level answers.

Go will likely get you better pay than PHP, but PHP will be much easier to get up and running with. Security is not tightly coupled to anything. You just need to know how to do things well... you can code crap in any language.

Unless you want to be a poor soul being wrung out by a startup or dev shop, I would not try for "full stack" immediately. Get good at one thing and expand out from there. You will likely learn some bits of the other side as you grow.

The market is flooded with JS devs from bootcamps (I do not believe the pandemic has changed that), so I would say to try your hand as a back-end developer. Of course, if you feel you are more of a visual person, you should stick with front-end work since you will be happier there.