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Mistakes I made while learning Web Development as a beginner

Harshit Aditya on December 03, 2021

This blog is all about mistakes I made while learning Full Stack Web Development as a beginner. I started my Web Development journey in November 20...
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Tal Rofe

The biggest mistake I made was learning PHP. :|

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Rudoslav • Edited

My 2 cents on the phenomenon:

---- About me/our team -----

I'm a backend developer (not a coder really, since I take business acceptance criteria -> do my research -> design the feature from logical and technical point of view -> write tests and code it -> create docs -> yada yada) for a few years now.

---- Our environment ----

I come from an environment, where we use:

  • Magento monolith - which uses couple of PHP frameworks under the bonnet + the Magento e-commerce framework on top.
  • A PHP lumen/laravel app as a specific microservice for our Warehouse
  • A few python apps for our Warehouse embedded devices
  • A few Java and Kotlin Android apps for our warehouse
  • Some serverless microservices on AWS (mostly in node) for specific tasks
  • and other, such as DB clusters, elasticsearch, ...

Our company generates revenue in tens of mil. € / year. We have up to 20k orders/day.

And so far we did not hit any limit of the PHP as a technology.

Of course you can't compare this to Facebook and the load on it's servers, but as Rasmus Lerdorf himself said (paraphrase):

"It's just a tool, what really matters is what you create with it"

What matters is what you aim to achieve.
For our team of 7 devs and 2 testers it is "as high as possible quality" + "business value". And with PHP we've been able to do this for a few years now.

---- The ending point ----

It is perfectly possible to either gain bad an good development and coding practices in any language - be it PHP, JavaScript, ...

If you start / are intermediate in / already have done a lot in web development - you can still gain knowledge and push yourself further with PHP as you can in any other.

With PHP you can do almost the same as with any other server-side or scripting (maybe except stuff like serial communication with another device) language (what a junior dev might need/want). You can do object oriented; test driven; scripting; socket communication; microservice; design patterns... What we people sometimes fail to realize there are different tools for different tasks.

(yes, you can even use strict data types on file level)

Do not worry about PHP.

Pick your strength (language or technology), but surely expand to others as well.

Worry about:

W3C or other standards;
KISS, DRY, SOLID, ... (standards)
Open API;
good practices in code;
unit and integration tests;
stress testing;
debugging;
using an IDE;
documentation;
different git workflows;
making your app migratable to different server/env;
docker or equivalent;
microservices;
cicd;
machine learning;
working in scrum or kanban;
...

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punisher49 profile image
punisher49

Hahahahahahahahahahahahaha

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Andrew Baisden

To this day I never fully learned PHP. I only learned enough to do some basic templating using WordPress.

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Abdinajib Junior

Why bro? I wanna to start it ASAP.

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Adamity

Dumb mindset 👌👎

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Anthony Hagidimitriou

Look into the Laravel framework to make use of your PHP knowledge. Very versatile framework to solve many different problems

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Nishchal Gautam

Same here

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Harshit Aditya

No Comments 😂.

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Rakshith K B

But Why, isn't PHP required anymore in industry?

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Lasha Kajaia

Why you think so?

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Nishchal Gautam

Out of biggest adapter of php, fb learnt its shit so they went for hack/hhvm.

Out of new big companies only slack uses php and like it as far as I know.

The actual reason we don't like it has mostly to do with dynamic types and shitty language as a whole.

There are many people who would defend it, but they probably don't work as a team, or have built a large project

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Tanmesh♠️

Another mistake !! People use raw knowledge learnt from scratch to create new websites evn after a yr of learning ! Thinking using bootstrap is not worthy. After a hold of 5-6 months on Web Development the developer should Start using amazing platforms like bootstrap,w3schools ,etc

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Greg Brewton

Agreed! When i started learning, I spent a year building with vanilla Html, CSS, and JS before learning React, Pug, or ScSS.

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Harshit Aditya

Yaa before moving to frameworks like React or Angular or Vue, it is important to have command in HTML,CSS and Javascript.

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Harshit Aditya

Yaa, Exactly !. Thanks for sharing your mistake 😀.

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N/A

Grey article! For people that want to build projects, I recommend front-end mentor. As a beginner, I just started it last month and I regret it so much. Sometimes, it's diffiy to think of projects to build, but front-end helps take care of that completely.

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Harshit Aditya

Thank you Kareemah. I hope you find this blog beneficial and helpful 😀.

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ConstEricB

Great tips. I'm lacking in a few.

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Harshit Aditya

Thank you !. I hope that this blog will help you to overcome the points which you are lacking at. Happy Learning.

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Aditya Arpan Sahoo

Keep going like this. I'm pretty sure that this blog will be helpful for beginners who're getting started with web development.

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Harshit Aditya

Thanks a lot bro !.

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Wayne • Edited

Thank you for this, it was straight to the point, insightful and helpful. Most posts I read just go on and on. I then end up getting bored half way through. This post was direct and easy to read and understand.

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Rohan Hazari

Nice tips especially the break one, taking breaks really helps me a lot. I was also thinking of joining a webdev community can u suggest some communities to join? will be of great help Thanks!

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Harshit Aditya

Thanks a lot Rohan for finding my blog beneficial !. For Communities I dont have know a specific community who focuses only on Web Dev but I know communities which focuses on all type of Development which includes Web Dev,ML, Mobile Development etc.
The name of these communities with their invite link are:
MichiSpotlight: (discord.gg/Ec2YsBRN)
OpinCo Community: (discord.gg/Va5gK3NS)
EddieHub: (discord.gg/AaYzEFk2)
and you can also join Twitter. There are many web devlopers on Twitter from whom you can learn a lot of new things ✨. Twiiter is highly recommeded from my side 💯. I hope this helps 😀.

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Rishabh Rathore

Amazing Work Buddy✨✨
Keep it up Good work

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Harshit Aditya

Thanks Bro 😀!

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Adit0507

Amazing article 👏

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Harshit Aditya

Thhank You !

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Abdinajib Junior • Edited

Thank you bro, I thought you're talking to myself. When it comes Web developer HTML and Css it an easy but the most difficult are Jquery and JAVASCRIPT.

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Harshit Aditya

Thanks a lot for your kind words Abdinajib 😄 .

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SAMUEL Omaiye Oche

Thank you dude. We all made these mistakes, especially when you have no coach

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Harshit Aditya

Exactly Samuel !.

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CoderZ90

Thankyou so much for sharing this! :). I learn from your experience

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Harshit Aditya • Edited

Thanks a lot CoderZ90 ! .

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Tom Connors

Every discussion forum I've seen is people posting their bugs and getting zero feedback.

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Ahmed Khalid

Should I learn C++ or web development first ?

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arcahyadi

Nice

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Ray Ribeiro - Qenpie

Nice article! Very helpful!

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Harshit Aditya

Thank you Ray 😄!

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harinagasaimadhav

I started Web Development from february, this year and I'm facing every single problem you have mentioned here. This blog will help in conquer the major difficulties I'm facing.