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Ben Halpern
Ben Halpern

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What are some misconceptions about web development?

When people think "web development", what do they get wrong?

Oldest comments (125)

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buinauskas profile image
Evaldas Buinauskas

According to my mom, I'm installing Windows. 🤷‍♂️

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stephanie profile image
Stephanie Handsteiner

According to everyone: I can fix printers.

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Jonathan Apodaca

This. 1000 times this.

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Alessandro Cuppari

According to everyone, I can fix their computers. If only they knew I can barely fix mine when it fails.

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Pacharapol Withayasakpunt

I expect everyone to be at least electrical engineer and devops. I don't care about your coding.

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Osinachi Chukwujama

Web development is the core of software engineering

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Ian Pride • Edited

Please explain what you mean for me. I started learning programming 20+ years ago from reading library books and a computer that had no internet for like the first year I had it. I got lucky to have the computer in the first place, but the web was even rarer and only suburban people could afford it and web development was just barely out of it's infancy. Even today where there are web apps everywhere there are exponentially more desktop apps. Most of the software I write and use has nothing to do with the web and even though, yes, I use the web to do research for software development; it's rare it has anything to do with it. I personally refuse to use web apps for things that have nothing to do with the web unless I have no other choice and it's something for legal or responsibility things. I try to open a browser as little as possible with the exception of research and a small amount of time daily I allot myself for free time.
If anything software engineering is at the core of web development, not the other way around.
This was not a rhetorical question, I really want to know what you mean as I can't fathom what it might be.

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Max Ong Zong Bao

"I don't know what you are talking about I don't care" 🤣🤣🤣

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Joe Sweeney

"So, that means you can fix my printer, right?"

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Adam Crockett 🌀

Sigh, I often do...

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vyckes profile image
Kevin Pennekamp

HTML & CSS are not programming languages

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adam_cyclones profile image
Adam Crockett 🌀

CSS especially, computations and variables and a limited form of logic.

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somedood profile image
Basti Ortiz

This right here hits the spot.

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Galuh Utama • Edited

HTML itself is not turing complete. So it’s technically not a programming language. BUT when you mix CSS AND HTML they can be arguably turing complete.

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wayofthepie • Edited

I've never understood this argument. Where did the idea a programming language has to be turing complete to be a programming language, come from 😄

A good example is agda. Agda is a total language, its functions always terminate and cannot return a value other than the type specified. This property makes it non-turing complete.

I would still call it a programming language. There are many other examples.

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Kevin Pennekamp

Agreed. I mean, even Pokemon Yellow is tiring complete

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ludamillion profile image
Luke Inglis

I think Turing completeness is more important when determining if a language is a ‘general’ programming language as opposed to domain specific languages.

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Michiel Hendriks

They're not, and I don't see why that even matters. C++ isn't a natural language. Assembly isn't a markup language. French isn't a formal language. Cuneiform isn't a spoken language.

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skydevht profile image
Holy-Elie Scaïde

Can't be a programmer if you don't know a programming language.

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elmuerte profile image
Michiel Hendriks

So? Not every websites needs to be programmed. Plenty of people spend quite some effort to program tools which you can use to develop a website, without programming.
And there's a difference between developing the CMS and developing the layout and styling.

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skydevht profile image
Holy-Elie Scaïde

I'm not saying it's bad. Just that people want the title of the programmer as soon as they learn HTML and it rubs them the wrong way when you say that HTML is not a real programming language.

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ludamillion profile image
Luke Inglis

Hence web developer 😉

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𒎏Wii 🏳️‍⚧️ • Edited

What you do with HTML and CSS is not programming, thus they are not programming languages.

Otherwise, as some have pointed out, markdown is also a programming language.

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Muhimen

I know HTML, time to hack NASA

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sergix profile image
Peyton McGinnis • Edited

"So... I hear you write websites. Can you make me an app?"

People always assume, at least in my cases, that web development = native app development...

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Rohit Prasad

Well, if you know React you can say Yes :)

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hj profile image
Hemant Joshi • Edited

Googling is most important skill to have and it really is❤️

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Panda Quests

But it is.

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adam_cyclones profile image
Adam Crockett 🌀

I wasn't hired, Google was hired.

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hj profile image
Hemant Joshi

lol

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hj profile image
Hemant Joshi

this surely made my day

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adam_cyclones profile image
Adam Crockett 🌀

Its not completely true, I am an experienced googler 🤣

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hj profile image
Hemant Joshi

Bro you need to stop, or I will stop learning Node and react!

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adam_cyclones profile image
Adam Crockett 🌀 • Edited

No please don't stop on my account, truth is I have been doing this a long time and I couldn't remember it all, there is just no way, but I can remember the topic or the right questions (the secret of success in programming, ask the computer the right question), so I use Google as it is a tool to get such answers, you as a programmer are expected to use the right tools for the job, brains often degrade over time.

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hj profile image
Hemant Joshi

❤️❤️❤️

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Felicity Ratcliffe (she/her)

This is absolutely true! :)

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Vaibhav Khulbe • Edited

I feel some recruiters think if they're hiring a web developer, they must be good at that AND:

  • Mobile app development
  • DevOps
  • Design (for full-stack web dev mostly)
  • And God knows what else! 🤷‍♂️

I sincerely think they're in a great misconception. Come on man, I'm good at web dev that's why I want to _dev_elop a _web_site! I'm not good at Kubernetes!

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Shaiju T

:) But I think this is the Job of Full Stack Developer. Isn't ?

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Scott Yeatts • Edited

Yes, but also to varying degrees. I started in FE, but I'm also very comfortable building a backend codebase. I'm weaker with DB and devops.

Don't get me wrong, I can stand-up a DB and deploy kubernetes containers, but when you get into the deep understanding issues I lean on my teammates that have devoted more time to those disciplines.

Full Stack doesn't mean "knows everything at an advanced level" it just means you can be productive and contribute at any level (while knowing when to call for backup and not spinning your wheels when someone else could help you get there faster)

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vaibhavkhulbe profile image
Vaibhav Khulbe

Full Stack doesn't mean "knows everything at an advanced level" it just means you can be productive and contribute at any level

Highly agree with this. Thanks for your input :)

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jgusta

I’m going to use this phrase instead of full stack :)

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Vaibhav Khulbe

Well, for me as a front-end dev, all of those skills just doesn't make sense!

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Micah Lindley

That's what I originally thought about backend technologies. However, as I move into increasingly difficult frontend topics I've learned that having experience in Node, NPM, custom APIs, and other server-side is extremely beneficial.

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Adrian Bece

Before I started working with React, I was an ecommerce (Magento) frontend developer. At the time, when I was trying to explain frontend development to a person that doesn't know much about programming, it usually went like this.

Person: "So what is it that you do at your job?"


Me: "I develop websites, I turn design into code and make sure everything looks, and sometimes function, as expected.


Person: "So you're a designer, then?"

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darkwiiplayer profile image
𒎏Wii 🏳️‍⚧️

Basically another version of the typical

A: "So what do you do?"

B: "I'm a programmer"

A: "Oh, so you fix computers and stuff?"

B: "No, I... uh... just forget it."

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Adrian Bece

Something similar happened to me with an older neighbour.

A: "So what do you do?"

B: "I'm a programmer"

A: "Oh great! Can you fix my TV?"

That was back when CRT TVs were still a thing.

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darkwiiplayer profile image
𒎏Wii 🏳️‍⚧️

It's not like I blame people for it, but it does make me wonder why nobody cares what programemrs really do yet I don't exactly see many people asking a carpenter to fix their car.

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tina

When I was working at an ecommerce company, my relatives were convinced it was Amazon. The concept that there are Amazon-like online shops out there were a bit too hard to grasp ;)

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Farhan Hasin Chowdhury

People often treat web application development as something inferior to making desktop software or mobile application.

I honestly don't know why.

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Panda Quests

Yeah. I think it used to be like that. But nowadays it is just as complex as backend development

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Tulsi Prasad

That it is taught in college. Bye. 👋

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Ben Halpern

It’s weird that the web has been around for a million years and colleges still treat it like a passing fad.

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Aniket • Edited

Honestly, most courses that are taught in computer science courses are more or less of no use at all. I think the only relevant ones I was taught at my college were ds/algo and databases, which were very basic themselves (only oracle SQL server in DB. Nothing about scaling, NRDBMS, heck not even some other RDBMS like postgres .) I wish we were taught so much more, but for now, college looks like a necessary hurdle you have to jump through to even get a job and nothing more ( in my country at least )

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Michiel Hendriks

Weird, when I did some database/RDBMS courses at the university almost 20 years ago we used PostgreSQL. Reasons:

  1. Gratis
  2. Most SQL standard conforming RDBMS
  3. Extensive featureset

So it was basically the most neutral RDBMS out there, and still is. It was about understanding SQL and RDBMS concepts, not learning Oracle, Sybase, or even PostgreSQL specifically.

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Tulsi Prasad

Yeah, I agree and also I think we're just in college for around 3-4 years but our career spans like for decades and we never can depend just on this couple years of college to know every thing in the industry. So, we always have to self teach ourselves.

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Lou (🚀 Open Up The Cloud ☁️) • Edited

Hrm, I graduated in 2014 and studied modern web development at the time, JavaScript, JQuery and CSS, LAMP stack were all covered alongside typical computer science topics. My university is top <10 in the UK.

That said, this is only my anecdotal experience, my opinion is also too that universities are considerably less vocational than other options, but the debate is still relevant: should they be?

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Peyton McGinnis • Edited

I agree. It's so strange how many universities only focus on OOP, systems programming, etc (which are very important) but barely paying any attention to the massive shift to the web in software development. It's not like it's anything new.

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Adam Crockett 🌀

That complex code is better and you are better by making complex things.

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Omar Sinan

That UI/UX aren’t as important 🤦‍♂️

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João Forja 💭

That what's important are the technologies used and not the domain of the applications we're building.