Intro to Web Development
A warm welcome to all my beloved Zairza juniors. Hope you are excited and eager to start learning code and develop amazing stuffs. This article is especially for the first years. I remember when my first semester was about to end. We were newly inducted to Zairza. The orientation day showed many awesome stuffs — drones, remote controlled stuffs, cool android apps and what not!
I knew those were the things I want to do, those were the persons I wanted to become. But the most advanced stuff I knew back then was.. maybe finding inverse of a 3 X 3 matrix using C++ !! We all were very much confused -so many things, where to begin with? Then the sessions of Zairza began, and the first topic we were introduced to was — Website development!
What is website development?
As the name suggests, web development broadly refers to the tasks associated with developing websites. It is the coding or programming that enables website functionality, as per the owner’s requirements. It ranges from creating plain text pages to complex web-based applications, social network applications and electronic business applications. The process includes web design, web content development, client-side/server-side scripting and network security configuration, among other tasks. There are three kinds of web developer specialization: front-end developer, back-end developer, and full-stack developer.
Front-end developers deal with the layout and visuals of a website, while back-end developers deal with the functionality of a website. Back-end developers will program in the functions of a website that will collect data. Since the commercialisation of the web, web development has been a growing industry. The growth of this industry is being driven by businesses wishing to use their website to sell products and services to customers.
Is website development important?
The answer is, it is! Now we come across a lot of articles, quora answers that web development is too mainstream and not advisable to opt as an career. People also say it’s useless, unnecessary, unyielding and many synonyms of the word “useless”. So should we still learn it? Definitely yes! And why? Well, let me explain you :
Current scenario of Website Development in market :
In the modern times, you can see most of the software development works are based on website development and mobile app development. Most of the major softwares have been transformed to web applications. Almost all organisations -public/private , major/minor , commercial/non-profit maintain websites to expand their reach. So we can be sure that it is not dying anytime soon.
Here is the list of most starred repositories of GitHub( as of 8th June 2018) :
1. freeCodeCamp/freeCodeCamp : An open source codebase and curriculum aimed to teach web development using MERN stack.
2. twbs/bootstrap : A popular HTML, CSS, and JavaScript framework for developing responsive, mobile first projects on the web developed and maintained by twitter.
3. EbookFoundation/free-programming-books : Freely available programming books.
4. tensorflow/tensorflow : Computation using data flow graphs for scalable machine learning.
5. facebook/react : A declarative, efficient, and flexible JavaScript library for building user interfaces.
6. vuejs/vue : A progressive, incrementally-adoptable JavaScript framework for building UI on the web.
7. sindresorhus/awesome : Curated list of awesome lists.
8. getify/You-Dont-Know-JS : A book series on JavaScript. @YDKJS on twitter.
9. d3/d3 : Bring data to life with SVG, Canvas and HTML.
10. airbnb/javascript : JavaScript Style Guide.
7 of the top 10 repositories are either web development frameworks, libraries or someway related to it. This makes it evident how popular and important web development is.
Now, since money matters, let me show you something. Following results were obtained while searching for internship postings of various fields throughout the country in the popular site Internshala.
We can see that website development has considerably higher number of postings than the rest. Now, the stipend may not be that luring but you can always get a web development job easily.
Perks of learning website development as student :
When we learn it and dig deeper, we come to know regarding various different stuffs as well. When you start developing websites, several other skills are built such as :-
1. Version Control System- Developing anything requires the use of Version Control System to save our revisions and effectively collaborate with other developers.
2. Searching and fixing errors-A person is going to encounter heavy amount of errors and while fixing them, it boosts ability and skills of a programmer to make proper use of Google and Stackoverflow to remove bugs.
3. Build tools- They help us in automating creation of executable applications from source code. They are life savers for developers.
4. Cloud services- We often require to use cloud services such as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google cloud for hosting of websites. A basic understanding of cloud also proves to be helpful in Machine Learning, Big Data and other fields.
5. Contributing to Open Source- There are more than hundred thousands of open source repositories of web technologies and most of them are easy to contribute to- with proper documentations and beginner-friendly communites.
6. Having a strong hold over JavaScript- JavaScript is one of the most popular languages these days. Having a good knowledge of JavaScript also helps in programming with other languages. We are shortly gonna explore why JavaScript is awesome.
Applications of JavaScript :-
1. Websites -Making any website without JavaScript is impossible, let it be Facebook, Instagram, the CET website.
2. Softwares -JavaScript has various frameworks that enable us to build desktop apps, like Electron, Appjs. Some popular desktop apps built using JavaScript are — VSCode, Slack, Atom etc.
3. Mobile Applications -Frameworks and libraries like Ionic, React Native, MeteorJS are used to make mobile applications. Example — Facebook Ads Manager, Bloomberg, Myntra etc.
4. Robotics- JavaScript has many frameworks for robotics including- Nodebots, Cyclon.js, etc.
5. Machine Learning- There are debates about using JavaScript as a programming language for getting started in machine learning, but it is evolving and thus its capabilities of applying machine learning with it. Some popular ML libraries are- DeepLearn.js, KerasJS, TensorFlow.js .
So the world is your oyster. Try your hand and reach out to us for any doubts. Stay tuned for more useful articles.
