20 things I learned changing to a career in web development.
A quick observation at the last few months as a front-end developer.
- You spend less time with people and more time with computers. You must be active in changing that.
- You have to read everything. Read — not skim.
- You could easily gain weight if you aren’t active enough. Force yourself to get up and do things.
- Work is no longer a 9-5. Which isn’t a bad thing cause nothing feels like “work”.
- Work projects and personal projects blend together. Again, not a bad thing.
- You might not build cool things at first.
- You probably have to ‘fix’ someone’s code at first.
- You’ll inherit code, and you’ll think its crap. But regardless of reasons why, you’ll need to learn to work with inherited code.
- Other code might look ‘ugly’ but you’ll learn from it.
- Your first job probably won’t be glamorous it might be boring and it might not be that ‘startup’ you read about in Tech Crunch.
- There aren’t many junior developers, so don’t be one. And the term ‘junior’ in web development doesn’t mean less knowledge, just less experience.
- Continuous education is your responsibility, not that of your company or industry.
- Stackoverflow. Google. Stackoverflow. Colleagues. Twitter Friends. Pray for help. Stackoverflow. Stackoverflow. Stackoverflow. Stackoverflow.
- Seek out critique from your peers, at your company or online.
- It’s easy to get lost in the black hole of projects. So make sure to pick your head up every now and then.
- Quality code takes time. Respect that.
- Learning is an active skill, not a passive one.
- You’re going to feel stuck — a lot. But you’ll figure it out.
- Your first job might not be sexy, but it’s a start.
- You’ll amaze yourself at what you can do.
Additional tips added by the Medium/Development Community
- It’s increasingly difficult to get a job doing webdev as orgs tend to blend it w/ SDE or design. — @nickf
- Don’t forget to add MDN — @NateElliott
If interested, feel free to upvote on Hacker News and/or Designer News
