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Claudia Nathan
Claudia Nathan

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On Learning Web Development When Web Development is Still Learning Web Development

#beginners #career #learning #webdev

Hey DEV community! I've been here a little while, learning from everyone in the backdrop. I've decided to take my learning journey public and am kicking things off with what probably reads like an existential crisis but was a really big turning point I felt compelled to write about.

I want to start with a disclaimer, I am still rather new to development. I'm not here to make grandiose, opinionated statements about anything in particular to anyone in particular. I wrote this to help myself compartmentalise what I was finding so difficult about learning Javascript (and anything really beyond HTML/CSS), and am publishing it only in case there are people like me out there, who are fascinated by and deeply interested in the field, but are stuck in the quicksand at the front door.

Man typing furiously on burning computer. source: GIPHY

Since the following realization dawned on me, I've made pretty significant strides in my my ability to learn, understand and put into practice all things web development.

The reason learning to code feels impossible isn't just because it is a complex, layered and vast field of knowledge and expertise, it is also largely because the structure of the field itself creates a specific kind of cognitive trap. But once you see it, you can stop fighting it and start working with it.

I'm both lucky and disadvantaged to be learning web development in 2025. Lucky because so many problems have been solved. Disadvantaged because I'm inheriting a world I didn't watch being built.

And this is the trap: you need context to learn, but you need to learn to build context.

This creates what philosophers call a hermeneutic circle: you need to understand the whole to understand the parts, but you need to understand the parts to understand the whole. You're trapped in a loop where each piece of knowledge requires context you don't have yet.

Woman frowning as overlay of complicated algebra surrounds her. source: GIPHY

Development is a complex thing, and it's different in nature to other complex things people learn, such as medicine or science. The difference I've realised comes down to four factors:

  1. Programming / Web Development is very young. It's too young to have settled (best practices are still being argued about) and it's moving too fast to stabilize (by the time something becomes 'standard,' it's already changing).
  2. It is a largely democratized field. Because it is so young and because of it's nature, everyone has a voice and an idea around the why, how, when and where of it all (none of which are wrong or right, it just comes down to what gets adopted by the largest number of people).
  3. It is not standardized enough to have a clear path. While there are bodies and standards, none are finite or 'complete', and none are necessarily the definitive 'authorities' of their domain. We may follow one, abide by its rules and paradigms, but then before we know it there's an entirely new standard with different rules and paradigms and a large number of followers advocating for it's superiority.
  4. It is not constrained by a reality external to humans. This is the big one and has a few different components to it, so let's dive into it.

The fields of medicine and science are both constrained by an external reality. There's a thing out there - a body, a universe - that doesn't care what we think. The goal is to understand and work with what is.

Programming has no external reality. It's just humans, all the way down (for the sake of keeping this from getting too abstract, I'm not talking about the invention of the computer, which was made possible by the constraints of our external reality and our understanding of them. This is about what we decided to do with that invention).

  • Medicine: the goal is human health (bound by biology, which existed before us)
  • Science: the goal is understanding (bound by physics, which existed before us)
  • Programming: the goal is… what? To make computers do things? But why those things? And how? And the answer is just… "because another human decided to build it that way to achieve the thing they wanted to achieve."

Programming is a field where:

  • The problems only exist because we created them.
  • The solutions only work within systems we invented.
  • The "better" way to do something is determined by humans arguing with other humans.
  • There's no natural law to discover, no biological truth to respect
  • The constraints are arbitrary - they were chosen by someone, somewhere, and could have been different

So when you're learning, you're not just learning how the body works or how gravity works and then once you understand those things, either finding a job where you put that knowledge into practice and upskill here and there where necessary, or joining a research body to expand our understanding of, in this case, the universe or the body. 

You're learning how some people decided this should work, why they decided that, what assumptions they made, which of those assumptions are still true between yesterday and today, which abstraction layer you're operating in, and how the humans who decided these things probably fucked something up along the way that will require a new set of humans to develop another abstraction-layer-solution for. Job at the end? Maybe. Join a research body to contribute to deepening our understanding? You're already in one, friend. 

When you enter this 'field', especially in a time like 2025, you're not really entering just a field. You are a newborn baby in a constructed universe that has its own:

  • Physics (how computers actually work)
  • Languages (literal programming languages, but also jargon, culture, communication styles)
  • Geography (frontend, backend, DevOps, data, systems…)
  • History (why things are the way they are, what came before)
  • Politics (who controls what, which companies/communities/bodies have power and why)
  • Economy (what's valued, what's dismissed, who gets paid)
  • Philosophy (how should code be written? what is "good"?)

And unlike being born into the real world, where you get to just exist in it for a while before choosing a profession, in programming you have to:

  • Learn this universe exists
  • Learn how it works
  • Learn to speak its languages
  • Learn its history (because without it, nothing makes sense)
  • Build enough context to even understand what the options are
  • THEN decide what you want to be

It was this that led me to accept and lean into the complete chaos (the exciting kind) that is the field of web development. Once I understood that, and I understood how we got to the first website and the first app, I was in it. I gave myself a metaphorical web development birth certificate and trudged along.

There is a lot to learn, but there's a lot that's left up to you. I went to university and got a degree in 'Literature and Cultural Studies' (lol no I did not listen to my parents, I am an eldest child and I had to everything learn the hard way). I chose that degree because I knew I liked to be creative, I liked taking arbitrary rules and seeing what new things I could make with them.

This is why I now look at programming as an undoubtedly creative field (albeit a creative field in an alien universe). Once you learn to inhabit this world you didn't know existed, with rules you have to discover in order to eventually figure out what role you even want to play in it and so on, you can start to wonder, tinker, create and innovate.

So what do you do with this?

If you're like me, once you see that programming is a constructed world with contested rules, you stop waiting to 'understand everything' before you start. You stop looking for the one correct path, because there isn't one.
Instead, you learn like a baby learns a language: through immersion, not textbooks. You build things that barely work. You copy code you don't fully understand yet. You participate before you understand, because understanding follows action.
The discomfort isn't a bug, it's the entry point. Confusion means you're at the edge, and that's where learning happens.
You're not learning your way out of confusion. You're building your way through it.

Recommended Resources

I've included below a list of the resources I found the most helpful in my learning journey (there are lots of great resources, but I am only including the ones I stuck to, because options was a big part of the road-block for me).

A lot of the courses I undertook were paid (The Odin Project, though, is completely free and was probably the most important and most helpful one of all) but this is not to say you have to pay for courses to learn these things.

I decided to invest in these structured courses as I was able to afford to do so, but this is a field where you can learn everything you need to learn for free. I've tried to include as many of those as possible below too, and have marked which are paid and which are not.

If you happen to be reading this at the time of publish (November 19, 2025) a lot of these courses have Black Friday deals on atm!
Self guided learning can be really really hard in a field where there's no clear path forward, I found Developer Roadmaps a great guide for this.
I also found How to Learn Stuff Quickly - a blog article by Josh Comeau (to be referenced below a couple times) very helpful.

Foundational Skills

(basics of HTML, CSS, JS and their surrounding ecosystem):

  • The Odin Project (free, absolute 10/10 resource)
  • I also downloaded Mimo on my phone to practice in between dedicated 'learning' hours (free on mobile)

Extending on foundations:

HTML

You can't go wrong here, this is a short and wonderfully intuitive part of front-end web development. I never really undertook 'learning' HTML, though I started this journey in Webflow (my favourite tool to this day) which is sort of the equivalent of 'visual HTML and CSS'. It quietly taught me a lot of foundational skills before I knew what they were.
I believe The Odin Project and many other similar resources such as FreeCodeCamp cover all you need on this one.

CSS

You'll learn a lot of CSS in foundational skills, and you can leave it at that if you wish. But CSS is very cool, often underestimated, and gives you a lot of incredible tools. There's no shortage of places to extend on your CSS knowledge, these are the ones I found the most interesting/helpful or are courses from people/resources who I follow and can vouch for likely being very worthwhile:

Javascript

The below courses/tutorials will also require a decent foundational idea about Javascript, especially syntax, so I recommend you do as much as you can with something like The Odin Project first.

These were game-changers for me! They are all included in the monthly Frontend Masters subscription (which offers a free trial):

Non-Will Resources:

I have not taken this one, but I am signed up to every notification/email from Piccalli.li and they've just put out the below course:

React

(this is not the 'next natural step' after learning Javascript, it's just the one I wanted to take):

I'm hoping to come back here to recommend all of my favourite newsletters and accounts I follow to continue learning and stay as up-to-date as I can on the latest in front-end web development as soon as I get a chance!

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