Self-taught web developer here. I managed to get a job after 11 months of learning of my own. For me, the sheer amount of resources was overwhelming and sometimes got me thinking to give up, but I kept at it and managed to get a job and find out how web dev looks like in real life.
Eager to hear your stories.
Thanks, Alin R.
I really believe in learning the "why" of something and not just the "what" or "how".
For example, if you really want to learn web dev, you have to learn to some extent how the internet works, what are the various protocols for web (http vs ftp vs ws etc), what the hell is DNS, the whole client/server cycle (request/response etc) etc. Sure it can help showing actual HTML code to explain http or request/response but I feel a lot of beginner tutorials just focus on the result and not the actual path.
Teach about the document/DOM etc and then write a simple helloworld.html. But then open the web inspector, show them how the request was sent (header,data) and then show the response received from the server.
There is plenty of tutorial on the usual stuff but not many that get real deep which is useful for beginners.
It starts from the basics. Tackles forms, handling requests and parameters. Cookie handling and authentication. Hashing (on which he even shares a bit of Reddit history: they didn't hash passwords which allowed them to detect spam accounts using the same password, but then Murphy's Law hit and the laptop was stolen and the database with it). Indices, joins, etc..
He discusses Reddit's architecture evolution and why they made the choices they've made given the context, etc. Sometimes, it boils down to "we chose it because that's what we knew". Other times, "we chose it because we hated the other thing". It's fun to hear him talk about this.
The course is pretty cool and the subtitle "How to Build a Blog" is an understatement. There was no stress on writing beautiful code or something, but the message is clear.
Another course I'm looking into is Stanford's Startup Engineering CS184 by Balaji S. Srinivasan and Vijay S. Pande. It has been discontinued. I just did a flyby and it's pretty much what you're talking about (they do both "big picture" with their reading list (Thiel, Graham, Andreessen, etc) but don't shy away from getting down to "viewport" and CSS, setting up stuff on Heroku, talking about tmux. They apparently did a lot of "why" stuff).
In my opinion, much of learning is done as it would be in a physical system with non catastrophic consequences: doing stuff, analyzing phenomena by the changed quantities and state/side effects, deducing the governing laws. You learn much about CSS from inspecting elements and changing stuff then reading MDN, than from the opposite. The first gives you something to anchor new knowledge to as opposed to starting with a setting that is too formal and abstract..
I mean, even doing Physics one can't be so exact not to approximate and neglect the influence of something at some point and just do a basic thought/physical experiment.
Restyling wordpress yields usable results qiuckly, which is great for motivation. And motivation might be the most important things if you learn it by yourself. It's just important to take your time when encountering issues related to things below.
In general there is a fine line in programming: going as high level as possible only gets you in to trouble when things go wrong or need optimization, but you often don't have to know much more than one level down and a few basics to make better guesses about errors.
This is spot on. I would suggest someone who was interested in web dev to start with understanding the HTTP spec, not learning HTML.
I think a lot of web developers really don't understand hosting and all the ins and outs of it. And by a lot, I mean a strong majority.
First of all, the tooling. Should I use NPM, Bower, Gulp, Grunt, Webpack or something else?
What text editor should I use? Visual Studio code? Sublime? Vim? Emacs? Something else?
What Javascript framework should I use? React? Angular.js? Angular2? Vue.js? Do everything with jQuery? Something else?
What CSS framework should I use? Bootstrap? Semantic UI? Material Design? Something else?
Should I just use ordinary CSS? SASS? LESS? Something else?
Should I use plain Javascript? Typescript? Dart? Something else?
All of the above have a learning curve (which means spending your valuable time learning the specifics of each choice). And no matter which combination you choose, somebody will come along and tell you that you have made all of the wrong decisions and should start again with X, Y and Z instead, which is incredibly frustrating when you just want to build something.
I've learned that, if you have learned X and are using it to build something, and somebody comes along and says, What are you using X for, everybody is using Y now, X is dead, you just need to have enough backbone to say, X works for me, I know it inside out and I can use it to build a mean product, go away.
It reminds me of the old but still relevant Joel Spolsky blog post, Fire and Motion[0].
[0] - https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/01/06/fire-and-motion/
One benefit of learning Dart + Angular(.dart) is that you get an efficient programming environment with batteries included. The toolchain includes the usually required tools (SASS included, it is now implemented in Dart first and is ported to other platforms afterwards). The learning curve is small(er than usual), the tools are great.
The sheer amount of stuff you have to learn other than just the programming language you picked up. In fact it feels like as much, if not more, time is spent understanding tooling, distribution, packaging and hosting options for you web app. Little of which feels satisfying or enriching to learn because so much of it is simply endless administrative minutiae. No-one seems interested in simple, easy alternative methods.
This won't be a popular opinion, but I'll say it anyway...I am learning Python at the moment, and I can completely see why so many people start with PHP for web dev. Python - the language - might be easier and friendlier PHP, but Python's 'eco-system' for deployment and distribution is horrible, fragmented, clumsy and not easy to learn (or documented well).
I look at job postings all the time, and I don't feel I can honestly say: "Yeah, I can do that". I could learn to do what they need, or maybe the circumstances of the employment may cause me to be useless in its duration. There just doesn't seem to be a way to know what you're going to be working with until you just jump ship into it, and if you fail, well, nobody talks about that, and thats legitimately scary to me.
Sometimes I feel its not real, like the people who get 'real' jobs with this stuff can either just fake it and get lucky, or are simply better. It sucks, because I know I've made some cool things and can make much better things. It sucks even more because there's a limit to how much time you can spend working towards a complex career goal like software development before you just end up working a retail job full time to survive.
So, yeah, that parts difficult.
A solution to this can be making your development stack more and more compact according to the current needs and choosing a open source project or framework to work on which offers good community support and has a future scope.
But also not very useful. I became pretty clever (imho) but didn't know much about the web. I had no idea how JavaScript would interact with HTML, for example.
I found that learning how the internet worked helped a lot. So TCP, HTTP, DNS. Before I learned these things, I struggled a lot.
From there I learned Rails (and then Ruby, which is common but perhaps not ideal), and the rest is history.
This was over the course of several years though. One thing I'd really like to point out is that you're likely able to get a job earlier than you expect. That's not to say that you should be overconfident, but embrace being a beginner, ask questions, and know that you can still contribute.
I started around '08 on a Django-based stack with really only university courses and prior Python programming experience. I was very active reading about the tech stacks which helped substantially.
When building mostly static content, I relied heavily on templating. When it came time to add interactivity, jQuery was right there waiting for me. When more complex behaviors were needed, I had to figure out how to write actual javascript rather than string callbacks together. Then learning to manage dependencies and assets became necessary, ... and so on.
A mentor would have been an enormous benefit. I was very lucky in that I got a wide berth to work in, and much opportunity for greenfield work.
2. Even if you learn basics of these, you proceed to see online tutorials. When I started angular was all the rage. Midway through learning angular, facebook released react. As a beginner you get pretty much carried away by blog posts which go on praising the new tech.
3. Es6 comes in the scene. Enough said.
4. But you have to learn grunt/gulp to be productive.
5. Code in vanilla JS? Ever heard about typescript? All the angular guys are using it.
Css frameworks, jQuery, and many other things.
It's crazy how fast the things move in js world.
This is the point where you need to do some kind of a deep dive into UNIX or the command line of your OS and figure out what the hell is really going on. Processes, files, permissions, networking, security, etc. When you pull back that curtain a bit and realize you know almost nothing...
2. With languages like javascript, especially for those with no programming experience, it's really easy to get your feet wet and believe that you "get it", that you "know javascript". That's a fallacy. Javascript, perhaps more than other languages I know, is easy to stitch together to get working (quick and dirty) but really tricky to write eloquently in a way that follows core software development principles and in a way that is easy to manage in the long term (which is part of the reason that there are so many JS frameworks out there).
3. Accept that there are things that you just don't know (and things that you don't know you don't know) and dedicate time to learning from others; not just as you get started, but forever. We spend time on our team every day sharing even the smallest things that we've learned that week to promote this idea (even things like "I discovered the `git add -p` command and here's what it does!").
Because teaching them HTML/JS/CSS and/or a random framework simply 'always' is overwhelming.
And because some really like backend, others Frontend. Some really like Vanilla and others really like frameworks.
If we sit together for 5 minutes to talk about the requirements.. They usually getting really excited and seem to to do a Minimal Viable Product approach with a lot of motivating.
For some reason they learn really fast that way and start to make quick choices from the start because they have a clear goal and start to look more 'what works for them' instead of getting lost in all pretty looking blogs and to much technicall theory from the start.
Next to that, I'm being really clear that there code will always suck. Same as there 2nd project and the 3rd project.. Even my code will suck after I did 50 more projects..
Point is, they have to have finish something first, look back and than realise what they want to improve.. After a few years you know a lot of pitfalls and you 'could' call your self a good developer
A great way to meet people who can give you guidance is through local meetups. For example, you'll likely find people with web development experience at any Python meetup. Finding a good mentor will save you a lot of time.
Other than that, the need to learn five sets of semantics/syntax in parallel (HTML, CSS, JS, (Python|Perl|PHP), template language) with constant context switching was quite difficult as well. I lucked out in that the server-side tech I chose (Python & Zope) at least let me ignore SQL for a while, and I was able to minimize the amount of JS I used until jQuery came along to make front-end coding suck a lot less.
Otherwise I think web development these days has gone nuts, with so many technologies involved SQL, HTML/css, server side language and framework, not to mention JavaScript.. even if you decide to stick with React, which is the most accepted framework these days, within React eco system there are so many different choices of tools no newbie can get his/her head around that easily.
Edit also understanding the first language and framework you learn is just the beginning, there will be many. That's something that surprises many.
You just need to maintain a frenzy of non stop learning and write huge amounts of code for the next X years and you'll be OK.
It's the long way but the investment will pay off. New frameworks come along, you'll pick them easier because you'll already know which building blocks are used.