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Web developers make the web dynamic and interactive. While the skills required to be a web developer seem difficult to accumulate, it is not impossible. This video gives a brief overview of the skills required to get started as well as information on how much you can make.
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The early days of the web was filled with lots of static pages.
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These pages could display text and images, but offered no interactivity.
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Most of the websites we visit nowadays are dynamic web pages.
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They do all sorts of crazy things in the background and present us with
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new information that we can interact with.
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If you were to think of a website right now,
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there's a high chance you thought of a dynamic one.
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Facebook, the "New York Times," any blog—they're all dynamic.
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The magic that goes on in the background
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that allows these pages to be dynamic is because of the work of web developers.
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Web development, like web design,
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is a vast topic and has evolved into somewhat 2 distinct fields—
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front-end development and service side web development.
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To be a successful front-end developer,
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you need to have a thorough grasp of HTML,
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CSS, and JavaScript.
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On the service side,
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you should be good at programming and have a working knowledge
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of a scripting language like Ruby and databases, as well.
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Depending on the role you have,
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you will also be working with content management systems and
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e-commerce platforms.
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If you're out looking for a job as a web developer,
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you will sometimes run into roles such as programmer or back-end developer.
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These all mean the same thing.
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You will also see language-specific roles,
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such as Ruby or PHP developer.
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You might even see a job called
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web designer with the job duties of a web developer.
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In this case, the people in charge of hiring
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don't really know the difference.
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So make sure you understand what you're applying for.
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Let's hear from a few of our teachers on their experiences of starting out
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in the world of web development.
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[How did you get started in web development?]
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I got started in web development just
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because I kind of just grew up with computers and using the web.
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It was kind of the first programming
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environment I was really comfortable in.
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I never really did much programming in the normal sense.
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It was just—I kind of got on the web, and I wanted to have a website.
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It kind of progressed from there.
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I dissected other software on the Internet,
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so I worked a lot with modifying forum software and stuff.
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That's kind of where I learned PHP and JavaScript to start off with,
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and it kind of grew from there.
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I got started in web development
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when I was working in telephone support for an Internet service provider.
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In between calls, I started teaching myself PHP and MySQL,
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but it wasn't until after that job
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when I decided to go freelance—when I quit university.
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Then I started doing it professionally.
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I got started in web development actually very, very early.
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I started programming when I was very, very young.
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I sort of kept in sync with the web as it evolved.
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I started making web pages right around
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when Netscape 2.0 came out.
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I actually sent in a bug report to Netscape at the time telling them about pop-ups.
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[What was your first experience like?]
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My first professional job I actually got in college through the co-op program,
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and it was with a company nearby the school.
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I worked part-time.
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It was to build tools for hospitals to measure results.
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So it was a survey company.
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So I built a lot of tools that would help
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hospitals gauge where they were doing well
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and where they needed to improve.
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It was a lot of fun.
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I kept on top of the web industry,
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and I learned—I started out writing
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script in Perl.
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Then migrated over to PHP.
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This was all personal projects.
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Then after college, I started doing consulting professionally
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with Ruby on Rails.
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Well it was kind of scary because I was going freelance.
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I was very green—very newbie-like—with all these things.
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So I got this one client, which was taking up most of my time.
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Then I needed to find some other work.
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But that was quite difficult because you have to market yourself,
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and with a small portfolio from this one client
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it was quite difficult.
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So I felt like probably most people getting started in this industry—
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very anxious and not very self-confident.
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So you try and low-ball on prices.
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That results in—I don't think this ever really stops—
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people coming to you wanting you to build a website for them for free—
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for a cut of potential profits in the future.
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I tended to reject those just because if people
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have a business idea and they think it's worth it, then they should be willing
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to pay someone to build that site and product for them.
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Being technically minded,
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you tend to do a lot of the heavy lifting in those scenarios anyway.
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So it was quite difficult at first.
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But then I went to a small marketing agency
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and started my career path again—as it were—working through
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the industry from job to job,
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building a reputation for myself until where I am today.
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[What was your first work or project?]
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So I was a PHP developer for a marketing agency.
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I got the position by—well I didn't have much of that portfolio because of my
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limited self-employment beforehand.
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So I created a site to go in my portfolio that
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would be particularly interesting for that marketing company,
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which was—I worked with a text or SMS API
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where it posted to a URL.
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So I thought that would be kind of good for—
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they worked for rugby companies and other sports teams.
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So I thought that would tie in well with them.
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So when I did start working for them,
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I started working on their sport sites and other sites,
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and there was even people who had been working in a PHP developer role
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for a while, and I found that my self-taught skills
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and doing that stuff on my own,
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I was more skilled than they were, and they have been to university
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doing not necessarily a programming degree,
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but they'd been doing macromedia director
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and then went into this PHP afterwards.
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So I quickly found myself feeling more confident with the skillset that
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I was able to learn myself.
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I would say the first thing that got
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any real usage was when I worked at an apartment complex.
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I wrote a program to automatically generate
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bills for people when they moved out of their apartments.
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So I wrote a program to take all of our different inspections and automatically
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generate the bills for them.
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So that would be my first project that saw any real light of day.
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Other than that, most of my personal projects
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were just kind of learning how to do things
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like work with databases—nothing crazy—you know—little guest book apps.
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So—yeah—that would—I guess be my first real in the world project,
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even though I didn't start getting paid for consulting until later.
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[What skills do you need to work in the web development industry?]
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I'd say as a newbie,
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the best thing to be able to do is be able
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to read code and understand it
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because your first job isn't really going to
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be creating a new project from scratch.
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It very rarely is, even after a lot of time in the industry.
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You're going to spend a lot more time maintaining other projects.
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So being able to take a code base and start mentally modeling it
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so you can actually get some work done in it.
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Being able to read code—
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being able to read bad code,
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which a lot of the code is bad,
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and trying to understand it and figuring out
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as you go how you would make it better
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is—I think—the biggest skill—
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that and being able to communicate with other people.
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Because you're usually trying to fill a need,
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whether it's the need of a client or your employer or somebody else,
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you're usually building software to do something.
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So being able to communicate effectively
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with the people you're trying to help is really important.
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I would say probably the biggest skill
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to have as a web developer is being able to troubleshoot things quickly.
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When something goes wrong,
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it can be really tempting to check the same things over and over again.
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So learning how to troubleshoot things quickly and effectively is probably—
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I would say—the number one skill to have—not just with web development
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but in any kind of development.
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You know, it'll start with reading documentation and then
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experimenting and trying new things.
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I know it's kind of funny to say,
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but Googling for the error message you're getting is usually a pretty quick way
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to troubleshoot, but that's—I would say—probably the main one
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that separates a developer who can fix
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something quickly from someone who can't.
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Starting off in the web industry,
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you need to at least know HTML and CSS—
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the front-end stuff and really basic back-end stuff.
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You don't need to know—like a full web framework like Ruby on Rails
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or anything like that.
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You can get away—if you can talk to
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MySQL database with PHP
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and put information in and get it out,
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that's about it really.
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That's—some of the client work that you'll work on in a small to medium-sized
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agency are very much brochure websites,
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and you can secure those very simply.
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[How hard was it to learn these skills?]
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How hard was it to learn these skills?
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It's difficult to say because I'm still learning.
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I think for me learning has been something
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that's been fun and pretty easy to do.
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I definitely struggle with things,
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but I'm constantly learning—
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trying to learn better,
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and I think for me one of the best ways for me to learn was to do it in a way
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where I had to teach other people or teach myself
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because then it really helps you learn the material.
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That's probably why I got into teaching, as well.
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My learning style has a lot to do with
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being able to explain what I know at least to myself,
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and then being able to take that and talk to other people has been really effective
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in me being able to teach.
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Like anything else,
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it starts off a lot harder than it is as you go on.
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When you first start programming,
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it can be very intimidating when you encounter an error message
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or some sort of problem in your program.
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Once you learn how to fix it,
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kind of the act of going through that struggle
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of encountering errors, learning to fix them,
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learning to solve different types of problems
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starts to get much and much easier as you go on because you are able to
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generalize everything that you learn.
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I made a conscious effort to learn CSS
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because it was the proper way to do it.
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Before I was doing tables and table-based designs and things like that.
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That can take quite some time to grasp,
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but it's through actually trying in your own time.
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It's okay reading a book or a blog or a course,
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but you really need to start developing your own sites with these things.
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So that can take quite a while.
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But I would say I was comfortable within a couple of months of working at it.
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In terms of PHP and MySQL,
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it was fairly straightforward,
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but then again it's like I started when I
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was in my teens doing basic programming,
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using QuickBasic, which is a DOS-based programming language.
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So I had some concepts of conditional statements and subroutines or functions.
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So once you've really cracked your first language like PHP,
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it's easy to jump off that onto other things like Ruby, JavaScript—Java even.
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So once you know the basic building blocks of any programming language,
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you can branch out into all these other languages.
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[How do you keep up with the pace of the industry?]
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The way I keep up-to-date—
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generally I used to be very religiously
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following certain podcasts and tutorial sites.
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But eventually, it's just too much to process.
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Eventually—because the industry is moving so fast,
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it's hard to keep on top of all these things,
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What you learn this week
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may be out of date in 2 or 3 weeks' time,
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especially with all these open-source frameworks evolving
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and developing as new contributors come on-board.
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It's really hard to keep up with that pace.
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So you need to kind of extract
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and understand what's going on with NoGIS
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or that's good for many concurrent requests.
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Is it asynchronous?
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Whereas Ruby on Rails is a nice CRUD stack
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of tools that you can build APIs with and simple websites with.
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It's about choosing what battles you're going to tackle with these things.
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So if you want to learn Ruby on Rails,
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and it's particular to a project,
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follow the Ruby on Rails podcast and Ruby shows and things like that.
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But in a general sense, you keep looking at "Hacker News."
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Follow some of the frameworks
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main contributors on Twitter.
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Get a feel for what's going on,
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rather than the granular detail.
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These days it's really important to stay on top of blogs and what's going on
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professionally like with each new release of a web browser.
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More and more things are supported.
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It's important to stay on top of the latest specs.
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With a framework, such as Ruby on Rails,
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there are releases of it all the time.
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With sites like GitHub,
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you can keep track of all the changes being added to Rails,
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and then there's always people writing about what's new.
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So by constantly staying on top of that—
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listening to podcasts, reading industry standard blogs,
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you can keep a pretty good handle on what's going on—you know—
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watching thinks like the Treehouse show.
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That's a really good one to watch.
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How do I keep up?
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I don't know if I can keep up with the industry.
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Everything moves so fast.
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It's really the valuable—the skill to have is to be able to filter.
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Because more new things come out everyday
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that you can possibly use.
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So your time is best spent working on things
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that are going to pan out and be helpful.
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But knowing what those are is really the tough part.
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I don't always get that right.
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I've wasted my time learning tools that
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probably aren't very good,
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and I learn a new tool here and there.
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I just try to keep an eye on it.
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When I read about something,
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try to see if it's being used in practice—
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see if it's different from what I'm using—
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different enough to solve new problems.
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The things you want to identify when learning something new are if it solves
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the type of problem you have or if it solves an entirely new class of problems.
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Both are good because you can either improve what you're doing now
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or open yourself up to entirely new solutions by
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learning something, based on where it lies in that spectrum.
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[Do you enjoy your job as a web developer?]
15:57
I definitely enjoy my job as a web developer
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because I get to build things,
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and that's always been my passion is building things,
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whether they're physical things—
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I was huge into Legos as a child
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and built robots in high school.
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Software development and web development
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in general has been a really awesome thing
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because it allows you to build things very
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quickly with very low or practically zero material cost.
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You can just come up with an idea some night
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and then just spend your time building it,
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and you've made this awesome thing just from your brain.
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I would say in general I do like working as a web developer because it's that
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instant feedback that you get from building a product that is either successful
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or interacts with a client and their users
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and just seeing that story play out is really good.
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I would say the bits that I don't enjoy
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about it are sometimes the clients that you have to take on out of necessity
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and to survive sometimes.
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But you always learn something from those interactions.
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I've definitely had projects that confirmed
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that web development is what I really like to do.
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When you wake up and you're energized
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to work on the project and even tempted to work on it after hours or when you're
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not working or when you think about it later.
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For me, that sort of let me know that I was doing the right thing.
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Like web design,
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web development is a fast-pace industry
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with a lot of demands,
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but you are definitely rewarded for it.
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An entry level developer with sufficient
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knowledge can expect to start at around 40 to 50 thousand dollars.
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Senior level developers with years of experience and leadership
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under their belt can earn upwards of 150 thousand dollars a year.
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If you like building things from scratch,
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but don't like messing with physical things or you love tech but prefer writing code
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to playing with pixels,
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then web development could definitely be the career for you.
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