My experiences as a first time Web developer

Before I joined KNOLSKAPE last year, I didn’t know much about web development. So I took this as an opportunity to learn something new that I hadn’t learned in my college. After a little bit of research, I came to know about things like HTML, CSS and Javascript. Little did I know that this was bare minimum needed for web development, and the actual process went much deeper than that. So here I would like to write about my training process and the things I have learnt in this past year.

My training started with the review of Three tier architecture, HTML and database design. This was just to ensure I knew the basics that were used in the development of an application. I also had a brief session on GIT to understand the basics of GIT. Then, I had a requirement gathering session, which helped me to know how the requirements should be collected and to be thorough while gathering them. After this, there was a session on wire-frames and database design. Next, was a session about APIs which was something new to me.

The Javascript training began after the basics, and it was after this that I knew that web development was not as easy as I had thought. This was different than any other programming language I had learnt, having things like objects and closures. After working on JS for almost over a month, I had Backbone.js training, where I learnt about the MVC architecture. After this came React-Redux, which is highly popular now and is used in many products at Knolskape.

As I learned all these things, I faced a lot of challenges. One of the mistakes I made was not going through the basics before jumping into the frameworks, because of which I had to go back and review my JS training. Another mistake I made was not taking styling elements seriously, which has given me some issues occasionally.

One more challenge that I faced was the number of changes that the JS libraries go through frequently, which in turn can change the way a few things work, or how efficiently a job can be done. Yet another challenge was/is the project code, understanding what a person has done in the code. This gets getting used to, but because of this I now know that writing clean code is essential for a project, and can help other people working with you on the same project.

In conclusion, my first year as a web developer has been full of training and learning new things, and I’m loving every part of it. One of the best moments for me is the ‘aha’ moment, that brief instance, when, suddenly, you “get it.”

After the eighth read of the code, what was once blurry is now, at least somewhat clear!