How To Become A Web Developer in 2023

How To Become A Web Developer in 2023

Web development is the process of building websites and applications for the internet, or for a private network known as an intranet. Web development is not concerned with the design of a website; rather, it’s all about the coding and programming that powers the website’s functionality.

From the most simple, static web pages to social media platforms and apps, from ecommerce websites to content management systems (CMS); all the tools we use via the internet on a daily basis have been built by web developers.

Web development can be broken down into three layers: client-side coding (frontend), server-side coding (backend) and database technology.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                          We will discuss a lot of technologies, trends, and tools but we don’t want you to get overwhelmed, so you need to decide first what do you want to do to become a web developer because that will help you to choose the right tools and technology to learn. There are a lot of different reasons to become a web developer some of the options are given below… 

• You want to work for a company as a web developer which is the most popular and common reason.
• You want to work as a freelance developer to start your own business or agency.
• You can become a consultant for other companies.
• You can create your own app to make money. 

From the above area of interest or goal, you can pick up the right tools and technology that is applicable to your goal. If your goal is to become just a front end developer you can choose the tools and technology of frontend development. The same goes for backend and full-stack development.   

Basic Tools and Software for Web Development

• Computer & OS: You can’t write code without a computer and OS running on it. To learn web development you don’t need any kind of fancy computer (If you have it’s good…). You can use any kind of mid-range laptop or desktop. For the operating system, you can use MacOS, Windows (Latest version) or Linux whatever is comfortable for you. 
• Text Editor / IDE: No doubt VSCode is good for most cases and most languages. It has good performance, great extensions, built in terminal and ton of features as well. You also have some other good options such as Sublime Text or Atom. If we talk about IDEs so Visual Studio (ASP.net or C#), Eclipse (Java),Code blocks(c or c++),Netbeans(Java,HTML 5 , C++,PHP) are good options.
•  Web Browser: Most of developers first choice is either Chrome or Firefox. Chrome is fast and it uses V8 engine (JavaScript engine). Firefox has also come a long way and some of it’s good stuff is not in chrome browser. Both the browsers have fantastic dev-tools to to troubleshoot the issues in web development.

Start With HTML and CSS

HTML and CSS are the basic building blocks of web development. No matter how advanced your web app is or what frameworks and backend language you are using, you will have to build your frontend application using HTML and CSS. So this is the first thing to learn in web development.

• HTML5 (Semantic elements, attributes, doctype, etc)
• CSS Fundamentals Colors, fonts, positioning, box-model etc.
• CSS Grid and Flexbox to align things or create coloumns.
• CSS Custom Properties

CSS Frameworks

Learning CSS frameworks is a bit less popular than last year but still very relevant or useful for developers who are not good with design. There are a lot of popular CSS frameworks available to use, some of them are given below.

• Bootstrap is the most popular CSS framework to learn. Learning bootstrap helps in learning other frameworks as well.
• Tailwind CSS is other framework which is gaining popularity and it is little different than the others. It is a set of utility classes so that you can create your own buttons and other stuff which really looks different than the others. They are also highly customizable.
• Materilize
• Bulma

 JavaScript

In now days JavaScript is very important for all the developers. Because JavaScript used in frontend as well as backend side.
After learning HTML and CSS, the next thing that you need to learn is Javascript. It’s very important for developers to have a good command of javascript fundamentals. You will be using a lot of javascript with server-side languages such as PHP, Python or ASP.net and learning this language is much needed if you want to work with React, Angular, NodeJS or any other javascript framework or library.                                                                                

Basic Deployment

At this point, once you know what tools or technology you should learn for frontend development, you need to know how to deploy your frontend website on the internet. If you are building some tiny applications, landing pages or personal sites for small businesses there is no need to learn AWS or DevOps just because it is shiny and trendy. You will be complicating things more instead of making it simple. There are some tools and steps for deployment that you should learn in 2020.

• Domain Registartion (Namecheap, Google Domains etc.)
• Managed Hosting (InMotion, Hostgator, Bluehost, etc)
• Static Hosting (Netlify, Github Pages)
• SSL Certificate.
• FTP, SFTP (File Transfer Protocol) is good for smaller applications.
• SSH (Secure Shell) for advanced app.
• CLI and Git.

Whatever tools, technologies trends or steps we have discussed till now is a part of frontend development. You don’t know the framework yet but you can build the website for individual & small businesses or you can build a mobile-friendly layout. You can also deploy your small application or project using the tools or technologies we have discussed so far. If you want to apply for the jobs then it would be great to learn some frontend framework such as React or Angular.

Front-End Framework and State Management

Frameworks allow you to do more advanced frontend development. Frameworks give you a lot of advantages such as reusable components, more organized UI or page interaction. It’s better for collaboration and helps in writing clean code as well. Also, learn about state management. Each framework has different ways of doing this. For 2020 below are some popular frameworks and state managers.

• React: library is the most popular to learn for web development and it’s fairly easy in comparison of other frameworks and library. There are lot of job available for React developers as well. You can use Redux and Context API with Hooks for state management.
• Angular :This framework is generally used in large organizations. It has pretty steep learning curve. Also it’s good to learn Typescript with Angular. It allows you to use optional static typing and support for the features of ES2015. NGRX and Services are good state managers to learn for this framework.
• React and Angular is best for web developer.

We have discussed all the majority of frontend development tools and technology. Now let’s talk about the language and technology to become a backend developer or full-stack developer.                      

Server-Side Language 

You should have the knowledge of at least one server-side language. To choose a language in 2020 some of the options are given below…

• Node.Js (Not a language but a runtime environement)
• Python (Good for absolute beginners)
• Java (Good for large organization)
• Php (Good for freelancing)
• Ruby (Less pupolar in 2020)
• C#
• Note: Whatever server-side language you prefer to learn, make sure that you learn about the data structures and algorithms using that language.

Server-Side Framework 

Once you learn one server-side language of your own choice, go with one of the frameworks for your language. You can choose one of the options given below…

• Node.js– Express, Koa, Adonis, Feather.js, Nest.js
• Python: Django, Flask,
• Java: Spring MVC, Grails
• PHP: Laravel, Symfony, Codeignitor, Slim
• Ruby: Ruby on Rails, Sinatra
• C#: ASP.NET MVC
• GO: Revel

Database 

Most of the web apps need a place to store data. In some cases, certain technology or certain languages go well with certain databases. For example: in Mern stack, M stands for MongoDB and in LAMP stack M stands for MySQL but it’s totally up to you which database you want to choose for your application. We are going to discuss some popular databases for 2020.

• Relational Database: RDBMS are still most popular databases. PostgreSQL, MySQL, MS SQL are still most preferred to use.
• NoSQL: MongoDB, RethinkDB, CouchDB
• Cloud Database: Firebase, Azure Could DB, AWS
• Lightweight & Cache: Redis, SQLlite, NeDB

When you will be learning databases you will also learn SQL (Structured query language) for RDBMS, ORM (Object Relational Mapper) or ODM (Object Data Mapper).

Deployment & DevOps

Hosting a full-stack app or backend app is a bit more complicated than just a frontend application especially when you have databases. Make sure that you know how to use CLI for deployment.

If you have a good knowledge of  both frontend as well as backend then congratulations you are a full stack developer.

I hope this information will be useful for you.