Which Difficulties I Faced Being a Self Taught Developer?

Richard Davis — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 08:40:56 +0000

I'm a self-taught web developer, I do not have a college degree in computer science. After college, I found programming interesting, and I decided to learn web development. BY profession, I'm into accounts and finance. I learned all of my web development from online blogs and YouTube videos. Here are a few difficulties I faced while learning programming:

NPM is the most basic thing to get started with Vue.js, Express, MongoDB, or just to run a "hello world" script in Node.js. Honestly, I watched a lot of videos about Node and Vue, but when I tried to code on my own, I found out that NPM wasn't installed by default, and I spent a few weeks figuring out exactly what NPM is.

Run the local server and the port number

Running a project with npm seems really simple as of now, but it got me really frustrated while learning and solving errors while running the server for the first time. I got so frustrated that I almost quit programming. But I spent some time, Googled issues, and eventually, every error started making sense.

Jquery

I started my web development journey with basic HTML/CSS, and along with that, many articles used jQuery. So, I learned jQuery as well, but when I did my research and decided to learn Vue.js, I found out that learning jQuery was a total waste of time.

So, here are a few difficulties I am able to remember as of now. I will update here as soon as I remember other difficulties. Thanks.

DEV Community: Richard Davis

Which Difficulties I Faced Being a Self Taught Developer?