Pains of a Web Developer
It often is this path (read Web Development) that most of the guys who think of starting a career in computer science or at least along the lines of it, take. It often is a pain in the behind when it comes to basically understanding how this ever-changing world of web really starts and the utter basics do seem easy, if you could take it like that.
Yeah, sure. HTML and CSS are fun to learn and they are great starting points in the path towards becoming a pro at it. But once you’ve kind of mastered your HTML and your CSS, you come around terms like Frameworks, Libraries and fancy names of versions and those “good-practices”. And once you start learning about one of those, you come across yet another fancy name that you sort of start to like, and the cycle goes on and on and on.
Now, you’re on that place where you’re in the process of understanding a particular framework and you’re making great stuff with it, following along some tutorials on the web that are redundantly the crispy cuts of those mighty documentations that are so poorly written that most take a quick glance and just leave it right there.
Take JavaScript for example, you start to learn the bare basics of it, the syntax and everything. And they all do make sense. But once you’re done with the basics and want to get your hands dirty by making some stuff, you realise you can’t write anything that would look good and at the same time reduce the typing efforts, you need to learn another library. There comes “jQuery” the first one of them all that makes your efforts easier in a way, but at the same time, takes the abstraction away from your reach and you’re limited to what the library tools offer. Then you come across some funny terms, like “Vanilla JavaScript”. And that’s when it hits you. You need to know the basic design of the programming language of the web.
Once you’re done designing these problems, somewhere along the road, you realise that if you start making bigger applications using just JavaScript, or for that matter, even jQuery, you are not able to give the project a proper structure. And that’s where you come across the likes of “Frameworks”.
Angular, React, and what not!
Man those documentations are heavy, aren’t they? Sure do.
But in the end, you are left with the only option and that is to learn it. You go over to YouTube, your first saviour, but that too is filled with crappy tutorials. Then you meet this Bucky Roberts guy and his channel thenewboston. Those videos start to really make sense to you now. In the good old days, people used to download the entire playlist on “How to learn jQuery”. Things start making sense. You follow along, make a few itty-gritty bits, make a new index.html and a style.css and a app.js files on your computer. And in the middle of the fucktons of those videos, you end up like, “This is done. I gotta get my hands dirty and shit.” You go straight to the documentation.
“Frontend is cool and all, but have you tried the backend?”
You try to make do with whatever you know like PHP. The CRUD thingy! Oh, the days.
It really is a tough road, yes well-trodden but still, you’ve got to carry around as a loner. But trust me, there IS light at the other end of the tunnel. You’ve just got to have a torch lit till there!
See you on the other side.
Satyam