What You Need to Know as a Web Developer
Learning to get a new job can take a lot of time, especially if you don’t know all the things that you need to learn. If you start learning random stuff or something you read online, particularly if the comment is a decade old, the standards will have changed and you might end up wasting time and effort.
Web developers have a hard task ahead of them and if you want to become one, you should know a couple of things. Here is what you should know as a web developer if you want to do your job successfully.
JS/HTML/CSS
Almost every web developer starts by working on the visual side of things, the front-end, what the user sees and interacts with. HTML and CSS are not really programming languages, but markup languages, which are used to generate content on web pages.
JavaScript is a language and a powerful one at that. It is used from anything like writing entire programs in it, to making interactive content on web pages. You could make a game out of JS and make it a part of your site, think, the Google Chrome Dinosaur game. These are the basics of front-end development and should be in every web dev’s arsenal.
DevTools
Every browser, at least a reputable one, has its own DevTools. You need to know how to use these if you want to debug what is happening on your pages when things go wrong.
You can edit code straight from the DevTools and you can also track various errors should they happen. It is a great tool to know how to use and every web developer quickly becomes familiar with them.
Back-end Languages
Web development isn’t just the pretty stuff displayed on the pages, but also the gritty stuff that works in the background, also known as the back-end. Server side languages are typically PHP, Ruby, Python, Java, and recently JavaScript.
Back-end languages help the developer solve any issue that might pop up on the server side of things, in the core logic of the site. Since this can happen, it is important for a dev to know how to handle it.
Databases
Every web developer will need to work with databases at one point or another. Choose one that suits your needs, though you should be familiar with most of them, if you ever end up having to fix another site, which is likely going to happen.
A web developer should know the following skills if they want to be good at their job. Once you get into it, you will see that there are more nuances that you should be familiar with, but that bridge should be crossed once you get to it.
