I've been learning web development for a year now. My programming journey started four years ago and I haven't looked back since.
I thought I would take a moment to reflect on the things I've learnt so far over the course of the year, hopefully this helps anyone who's just starting out in the space. Let's dive in.
Lesson #1: Move fast and break things.
Zuckerberg said it best. When starting out as a web developer, the most important thing is to do just exactly that - move fast, get your skin in the game, get your goals aligned and move towards making those goals and dreams a reality as quick as you can.
This means you don't and shouldn't have time for anything --- and by anything I mean any type of project that's not relevant to your goals, this means no looking into how the backend works when you haven't fully mastered the frontend, absolutely no quick looks, no peeps, leave it as it is. This allows you to stay focused on the goals you've set, learn from mistakes related to your goals and also achieve your goals on time. This brings us to the second lesson.
Lesson #2: Learn but don't learn what isn't necessary.
Even if you've successfully avoided dabbling into other aspects of development that do not align with your goals as we've stated above, there's still a great possibility that you'll easily get lost in what I like to call the "Abyss of learning". In this situation, you try to learn any and everything related to a particular technology, technique or topic, for example, when learning about html tags, you might be tempted to try and learn all of them (there are over a hundred of them). This will only slow you done, you might learn them all, but at what cost?, and practically speaking you probably won't even be using more than 15% of them in your projects.
Just grab what you need and keep moving, the idea is to be able to reach your goals in the time you want or less, and to achieve that you have to be pretty careful about time, cos as they say "time is money!".
Lesson #3: You get distracted by the shiny stuff.
If you've been in the web development space for even a week, chances are you've probably heard of frameworks, libraries and whatnot. I'm guessing you've probably heard of bootstrap, sass, less, tailwind and the rest and how they streamline and improve your work. Now don't get this wrong, I'm not saying in anyway that learning all these tools isn't worth the time and effort, each tool you will ever come across has its own uses and advantages. Though that doesn't mean it's what's right for you or that it's time for you to learn it, just because the influencer you follow on Instagram has courses on it, or because your friend knows it, or maybe some guy on YouTube says it's the "hot new thing".
I was a victim of this, I tried learning bootstrap when I didn't even know how css flex-box work completely, why? because a tutor said it's good, it's cool and I should try it. I ended up spending time to learn bootstrap (which was hard to understand at the time given that I still haven't mastered css), you can tell this seriously slowed my progress on CSS.
My advice here is to stick strictly to the core tech stack HTML, CSS and JavaScript, because while tools like frameworks are cool and also make your work easier, in reality, they're only applying a certain language's code under the hood (e.g css code). This doesn't seem like a big deal until you're working on a project that requires some more specific manual tuning, or you try reading someone else's code and you realize you can't read a single damn thing because you don't know what that framework is doing under the hood, which will lead to you spending more time learning, time you should have spent building and testing projects.
Note: As I've said, frameworks are cool and important, but don't try to learn or use them until you know exactly what they're doing, don't get too comfortable throwing about class names in opening tags when you don't understand what they do!.
#4: You Limit Your Potential.
Developers (especially beginners) are advised to build replicas of website, like remake a popular website, maybe a clone of Netflix, Google, Facebook e.t.c. there are even websites for doing just that. Now this is not a problem in anyway, it's actually a fun and effective way to learn how to build stuff by taking inspiration from real world websites.
What's the problem with it you might ask?, well the problem is a simple one, and it occurs when you focus on making these clones so much that you don't spread your wings wide. Basically you keep doing almost the same thing everyday, you select a popular website, make a clone of it, learn something in the process and move on to the next one.
But the problem is you just won't learn much quickly compared to when you branch out and build original projects that are birthed by your own imagination. Just check out a website of your own choosing, get some inspiration and instead of building something exactly like it, you build something different, something better, this way you learn alot and also advance significantly.
It's just like a toddler learning how to walk, if you hold him up and guide him, he sees, he experiences and he learns little by little, but if you let him by himself for some time, and he tries to do the same thing he saw you doing (walking) he'll probably fail many times, but then he'll learn much faster than if you were to keep guiding him.
CONCLUSION
The above are some of the important lessons I've come to learn over the course of my first year learning and practicing web development. My feet would have been deep into the waters of backend development by now, if I hadn't been distracted by the things I've mentioned above. I hope you find the lessons helpful and effective. I wish you luck every step of the way!.
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