What should web developers learn

Common skills used for back end development include web frameworks collections of pre-written code that developers can use for repetitive tasks like Ruby on Rails and NodeJS as well as the languages those frameworks are built on—Ruby and JavaScript. Does this mean going back to school for a new four-year degree in computer science?

Stack Overflow is a coding-related discussion board where developers interact through a question and answer format. Another solid, long-term strategy is to use this time to take on test projects—whether these are small paid jobs for friends in need of a personal website or projects based on a hobby or passion of yours, building real sites while the stakes are relatively low will put you in position to feel comfortable as your projects and job opportunities become more complex. There are pros and cons to freelancing and going full-time, and the path you choose needs to be informed by what you want out of a web development career.

The main point to keep in mind, though, is that either style of employment is totally possible for web developers. However, Holiday adds that in her opinion starting off at an established company is a good way to learn best practices early on.

Sites like Meetup. Use them! But over time, becoming familiar and then good at these skill sets means that you will always have a profitable career ahead of you. But the actual structure and code of the website play a role as well. Now, do you need to be an SEO expert?

Absolutely not. Dedicate at least hours to reading through resources and learning the basics. This will prepare you to develop websites with SEO in mind. Responsive means that the elements of the website adjust according to the screen size. This means that your website will look good whether the visitor is on a laptop or mobile device. In , responsive design was crucial. All of your clients will expect it — lead by example and make sure that your website is responsive.

You need to do a little bit of work and sell yourself. You also need to put yourself in the right places to get opportunities. Now, as a web developer, you have two choices. You can 1 try to land a full-time, on-site job with a company or 2 go the route of freelancing, and look for online gigs. We recommend freelancing. Most freelancers hit job boards to find their first web development gigs. Quite often, job boards will also attract people with unrealistic time frames and budgets.

Just understand that every gig you get on a job board while it may not pay extremely well will help you to gain experience and get more future work. For making it easy to get more clients and for clients to find you , you should create a portfolio site. Most of all — you should make sure your portfolio site looks awesome! I want something like that for my website too! Here are some resources to help you build your web development portfolio site:.

If you want to get great opportunities, you have to get out into the real world too. Make it a point to attend at least relevant networking events each month. Start by searching for meetups on Meetup. Then you can move on. This can be hard at first, but thankfully great places like Stack Overflow, Medium and Reddit exist where you can find useful discussions between frameworks, and figure out which ones fit your specific use cases the best.

Reading that book series really opened my mind, and I also highly recommend it to anyone wanting to call themselves an expert JavaScript developer. Once you got that out of the way, there are 2 extra resources I highly recommend to get an even further, more advanced JavaScript knowledge;.

CSS can get messy and disorganized very, very quickly. There have been quite a few different methodologies proposed to write cleaner CSS, but 2 stand out which I highly recommend you read about ASAP to stay competitive:.

A quick read through both articles should give you a solid foundation. By now you should have strong understanding of Grunt or Gulp. The next step is adding a JavaScript bundler to your task runner, which will allow for a more modular organization of your JavaScript application. Just be aware that webpack is the future, and what bigger projects are starting to use. Once you got that out of the way, continue with Egghead.

You can follow up with the official ReactJS documentation which is very well made and will allow you to fully master it.

Most courses on Redux are a bit complex in my opinion, but CSS Tricks Leveling Up with React: Redux does score a great balance between simplicity and being informative at getting started with Redux. I made a lot of mistakes in my 2 years of learning web development. Overall, I think my biggest mistake was not mastering the basics before moving on to libraries and frameworks. I guess this applies to almost every programming language out there, but in my opinion it applies even more to JavaScript.

This is because everyone loves to complain how their last place had one of the worst, ugliest code base in the world. How their code ended up so clean and well made they were proud of it?

Strive to make variable and function names understandable in English, even if you have to write a bit more. Not doing so will only lead to you having to manually document it sometime in the future to make it clearer. This will also cause your overall codebase to become harder to understand by new developers and yourself. Yes, yourself. Why yourself? This is because in my experience, I found jQuery did me more harm than good at first. Some of you may not agree, but please let me explain: When I first learned it, the general idea I understood was that jQuery was everywhere and that you could use it for pretty much everything.

Because of this, I got used to using jQuery for pretty much anything, and for any problem I encountered, I looked for a solution for it that used jQuery. The problem was that my entire way of thinking and all the solutions to common problems I knew up until that point required jQuery to work.

Using jQuery made me useless without it, and made me completely ignore the native methods and solutions that have always existed. It made all my solutions less portable too, since using them required jQuery. I spent a good 80— hours of training in Pluralsight, and I honestly want a good part of it back.

I could have learnt so much more if I had taken courses from better sources like Egghead. Overall, if you want to use Pluralsight, be sure that you are taking courses hand-picked by someone that took them first and that are recognized as high quality and useful. While true, I cannot stress enough the value paying for the right course has.

Yes, there are terrible learning paid courses which I would advise against since their value proposition is questionable see Pluralsight , but others like Egghead. Plus, they all have free 7—15 day trials so you can see which one works best for you.

If you play your cards right, paying 1—2 months of either of them can easily net you knowledge you would only otherwise get after stumbling upon countless of articles and blog posts over a year. So yes, they are not necessary, but if you can afford at least one month, you can be sure it will give you a strong edge.

These are in my opinion the secret sauce to being a successful web developer:. Whew, this article took a while to finish 6 hours and counting. I also added a few bonuses, which I would have loved to have had back then. As some of you already noticed, this is my first blog post, but you can be sure I plan to write more. Remember: quality over quantity!

If this article was helpful, tweet it. Learn to code for free. Get started. Forum Donate. Design Patterns Design patterns are basically reusable code solutions that can be repeatedly used to solve common software problems. Chrome DevTools Chrome is one of the most powerful tools for a web developer. Challenges I faced on my first job Once I covered the fundamentals of web development, I was ready for my first web development interview for an entry level position.

T he two biggest mistakes I found at first were: Fear of failure. Because I was the new guy, I was constantly in fear of my code being wrong or poorly made, so I spent a lot of time double-checking everything and adhered to coding best practices.