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What are some misconceptions about web development?

Ben Halpern on November 24, 2018

What popular belief is not true or not completely true in web development?

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puritanic profile image
Darkø Tasevski • Edited

One of the most annoying ones is that web development is easy and that everyone can create a website. Of course, maybe my grandpa can create a website but there are a lot of factors that a website requires to be performant and accessible among the other stuff. There are also zillion frameworks and this field is advancing on a week level, and there is always something new to be learned so that you can stay up to date. So you should be prepared to spare some time weekly for learning new stuff. Beside this, for web development, you only need to have a solid knowledge of Javascript and CSS, for now, you don't need to know ten programming languages to start looking for a front-end job.

Another common misconception is that when you finish the website your work is done 🙃If we're talking about production applications this is far from true.

You don't need to be an expert at maths to be a good web developer. That's mandatory for the data science and machine learning but in web development, you'll use your math skills on rare occasions only.
And you don't need to have a CompSci degree to start working as a web dev, this is mandatory for data science and ML (although there are exceptions here too as well). I'm self-taught (and no degree) and I've been working as a frontend dev for almost 3 years now 😎

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Cody D'Orazio

Mr. Tasevski,
I would love to have a talk with you about how you started with Web Development. I am in college for computer science but I know I can do this on my own. Is there anyway I can come into contact with you?

Cody

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Raunak Ramakrishnan

Common ones I have encountered:

  • Frontend is easy
  • Everyone uses Wordpress or PHP
  • Once you have a prototype (UI), the hard work is done
  • Not specifically web-dev related - typing a lot of code makes you a great developer
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voodoocode profile image
ɥɔɐ⅂ ɐɥɔsɐS

Once you have a prototype (UI), the hard work is done

No let's just stop there and call it MVP /s

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André Michel Andy

1) Think that web designer and web developer are the same.
2) Also, that web designing is easy.
3) Think that everything is done on the back-end and the front-end is just "making things cute".

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Chen • Edited

As a backend developer myself, I understand fully that frontend is as hard as backend, if not sometimes harder.
Ya sure, backend normally deals with stuff like business logic, but frontend requires a bunch of hard work to make everything look RIGHT.
Custom Components/Widgets is just as complicated.
Making things cute is not as simple as it sounds on paper:)

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Juan F Gonzalez

3rd one is one of my biggest pet peeves ever.

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Mihail Malo

I can do frontend (and backend) but I can't design for shit.
Kill me please.

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John Alcher

"My son made a website (Wordpress) in school, why do you charge so much?" and a hundred variations of this sentiment.

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Ricardo Rivera

many think web development is the same as frontend Development..

but the Web is a Client-Server architecure 😅

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omarel profile image
Omar Elbaga

Doesnt everything need to interact with a server though nowadays... You won't be doing front end in a silo unless you're on a huge team.

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Doug Black

Because I can make a website, I can fix your printer.

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Steve Turnbull

Great ... can you pop round? Mine's not working...

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James Hickey

From non-technical people: They just think you make pretty html pages - even for "Amazon scale" apps.

No idea what goes into the backend -> queuing work asynchronously, message brokering, distributed architecture, service segregation, exploring domain contexts, CQRS and/or event sourcing domain events, etc.

How do you even explain to non-technical people what you do in this case? "I make really complicated web applications?" is the best I can come up with 😂

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Alex Barashkov

That every developer who could code able to do anything. But at the end coding and actual delivering finished product is a big difference.

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rhymes

Yeah, maybe back in the days of Microsoft Frontpage frontend was easier. Now it's a little bit insane, as you're noticing with your fronted experiments I guess.

I don't know if backend is truly easier (distributed programming is not necessarily easy) but there's a ton more documentation and established practices.

 
puritanic profile image
Darkø Tasevski • Edited

@asparallel Yeah, there's a lot of differences between US and Europe jobs when talking about this field, but requirements for the field entry can be also different from country to country in Europe as well.
Btw, we've worked with Indian companies once or twice and after seeing what code abominations are coming from them I don't think that we (from Europe) can be compared to them on the same level.

Also, note that while I don't have a degree and I'm self-taught that doesn't mean that I don't know any CompSci theory and math. You don't need to know these things that much for field entry, but once you're settled you have no excuse for not knowing them, you should sit down and spare some time to learn about software architecture, CompSci theory, and math or those things will come around and bite you for sure.

Another thing is that I'm currently working as a full-stack engineer to be exact, I'm doing some coding on the backend (C#, Node) and working on DevOps infrastructure as well. I was thinking about going to college this year, but it's just a waste of time here, and I'm good learning on my own.

@dcmdorazio Please finish college, while degree sometimes is just a paper it can be useful for a number of things later on in your life.

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dcmdorazio profile image
Cody D'Orazio

I plan on it. I was just looking for more guidance on how to be better while I continue my degree. Thanks

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puritanic profile image
Darkø Tasevski

Sure, feel free to DM me if you need help with something. What I can suggest you is to find something you love to do and then practice the hell out of it until it becomes the second nature to you :)

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Max

That anyone who's stuck in any other career can "just get into it"... That one really bothers me, it's often thought that anyone can be a Dev. Ofcourse some people have talent, but it's not simple or anything

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Lars Wächter • Edited

That web development is just about HTML.
When I tell people I'm a web developer they often say: "Oh cool so you 'program' in HTML?"
My answer is always that the web is much more than just HTML.

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Valorm

Ooh so you program In html? 😹😹

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K

I have the feeling, many people think of web development, and in particular, of front-end development as graphic design.

I guess Flash and Shockwave are to blame.

 
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Mihail Malo

Don't fix that typo, it makes it even more accurate.

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Sethu Senthil

Hello world sites are far from practical real world webapps. So plz!

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Dinesh Pandiyan

"Front-end is easy. It's just positioning elements on the page and applying colors."

I've given up trying to explain to people that Web Engineering is a lot more than what you see on the screen.