WATCH THIS IF YOU WANT TO BECOME A WEB DEVELOPER! - Web Development Career advice

Key Takeaways

Hey there. So, I don't know what I'm going to title this video yet, but as far as I'm concerned now, the title is what I wish someone told me when I started web development. Um, I have people ask me all the time, "Hey, I want to start web development. What do I do? What do I learn?" And, uh, at what point are employers going to say, "Man, I want to hire this guy." And so, I'm like, "Oh, you found the right video." If that's you, you've got to watch this video because I'm going to shortcut years off your learning experience. And I'm going to tell you stuff that a lot of de developers don't like to tell people because they like to keep it a secret because it makes them feel like they'll be easier to hire if nobody else knows this stuff. But I don't think that way. I'm just going to tell you everything. So, if you're wanting to learn web development, I'm going to tell you this. This is it. I'm going to dump it all out into this video. So, track with me. I've got a Cogle mind map here that hopefully will make it easier to understand. Um, and I'll show you what to learn and what order to learn it in and what course to take to actually be ready for a job description that someone is trying to find today looking to hire. Uh, no matter what you do, if you're going to go into web development, you got to learn basic frontend. That's HTML, CSS, JavaScript. This is your first step. Get comfortable in the basics of all three of these. And here's the reason why is because no matter what browser you're using, if you're using Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, iPhone, iPad, you know, Android, it's running these three languages in the browser. It's opening up an HTML page with CSS styles and JavaScript functionality. Everything runs this. These are the three browser languages. It used to be Flash was on this list, but thank god Flash is dying out. Um, just don't learn Flash. Don't put it on your resume. It doesn't help. It doesn't really, you know, maybe there's a Flash developer out there that's going to get mad at me for saying that, but it's it's basically a dead technology. Um, basic front end, learn it. Learn HTML. That's easy. You'll learn it in a in a couple days. Uh, CSS, you don't have to become a CSS ninja. Just just learn how to do a basic layout on your own. Be comfortable with it. JavaScript, you don't have to do a whole bunch of crazy stuff, but learn the concepts of how JavaScript talks to a server. Um, which if you're if you're starting off, learn jQuery and learn jQuery.jax. jQuery Ajax command that and then you're done. I mean, if if you want to go back, that's about all you need to learn at first. Uh, just learn how to how to hit a web service, get some information, and spit it out on a page. Basic front end, that's your first thing to learn. Um, and then no matter which route you take, I'll go into this next. No matter which route you take, you want to learn a few things. Basic terminal usage. A lot of people avoid the command line or the terminal because it terrifies them to just see a black screen with a prompt. Um, it's not scary. It's just scary because you don't know which five commands to use. You're going to be locked into this realm of basic frontend until you learn how to use the terminal no matter which route you take. So, you've got to learn it. And then the next step is learn GitHub. I got a video on these two uh basic level for this. I'll put it in the description. Um, and you know, I also have a blog post that I will put the link to in the description that kind of is going to recap all this, give you a link to this mind map because you're going to forget it probably. Um, and I also strongly encourage you to uh to look into Team Treehouse because they have lessons to learn most of these things. And the first 15 days, I have a link on the blog post for getting the first 15 days for free of video lessons. And after that, it's only like $20 a month. A lot of people I talk to use Treehouse and they are learning the web stuff fast. Uh they're really really good lessons on Treehouse. So check out that link no matter what you do. Uh get 15 days for free. Uh and so back to this, you want to learn basic terminal and GitHub. You want to learn about web services slash they're also called APIs. Um specifically they can be called restful web services. You don't have to learn how to make them, but you want to kind of learn what these things are. Basically what a web service is is it's how the browser talks to a server real time and gets information. It's how a server talks to another server and gets information to send to the browser. That kind of thing. Just kind of be comfortable with the concept of what a web service is. If you're doing jQuery Ajax, then you'll basically be using web services. I'll leave it at that because we'll get into it later. Okay, that's off the table for now. And now you've got two choices. is you've learned basic front end. You know how to use the command line and GitHub. I'm ready to become like a full-on developer that people are hiring for. People are hiring front-end developers and they're hiring backend developers and people are hiring people that know both. Uh but you want to pick one or the other and then you can get a job. And so to kind of before I illustrate what those are, let's say how does the internet work real quick just so you guys can understand what those two roles are. We got these three things. We got the client, also called the front end. And what that is is that's your web browser. That's Chrome. That's your iPhone. That's whatever. And how the internet works is is you say, "Give me twitter.com." And so the client, the browser sends off twitter.com, and it pulls up the twitter.com server. And the server says, "Okay, they pulled up Twitter. What do we do?" Well, we give them the homepage by default. What's the homepage have on it? It has the top 100 most popular tweets. Okay. Okay. So then it talks to the database which is where all this information is stored. It says give me the top most, you know, top most recent tweets or whatever. That comes back to the server. The server puts it together in HTML, spits it back out to the client in the front end that makes it look all beautiful with their CSS and JavaScript. And then you know the client does some smarter things as you scroll down and you're running out of tweets. It's it real time talks to the server says, "Okay, I need 10 more tweets. Okay, let's get 10 more. let's send it back out to the JavaScript. Um, and so that's kind of your two worlds. You got your client which is called front end, your server which is called backend. And you kind of, it used to be these were the only developers because if you think like 10 years ago for the internet, the front end was ugly. It was just information and links and it was this basic front end was front end. That's all there was. Uh, but that is not the case anymore. Things have to be slick and smart and they have to have cool user experiences and fun user experiences. You have to know where the mouse is on the page and do specific things based off of what the user's doing. You have to let them log in and load up their profile without reloading a new page. I mean, that's basically front-end developer. So, if you're passionate about all that stuff, go front end. You can always learn backend and add backend in into it later and vice versa. If you like data and you like budgeting and finances and you like organization and stuff like that, you're not as much of you might not call yourself as much the the raw creative type who has to be into indie music that nobody's heard of. You might want to go backend at first. I'm not going to stereotype the two, but um either way, if you like development, you'll like them both. So, that's kind of that's kind of might help you decide what to take. So, I'm going to get rid of you. You're gone. Don't need you anymore. Let's say you've chosen to go front-end developer. Don't get overwhelmed. There's not much on this. It just looks complicated. This is if you learn these things, you are ripe and ready to go get a job as a front-end developer. And people are going to want to hire you. So, the first thing you want to do is you want to learn a JavaScript framework. Technically, an MV MVC or MV whatever MVAR JavaScript framework. There's about 30 of them out there, but I'll tell you what, people are hiring mostly BackboneJS developers and AngularJS developers right now. Used to be Backbone is like the main one and then there's a decent bit of knockout. Uh but the majority of jobs um Backbone or Angular is what they're looking for. Uh, and here's kind of why is is when you start writing thousands and thousands of lines of JavaScript to make this whole application that does your whole thing without ever navigating to another page, you need a framework that helps you organize that code in a way that makes sense, is not complicated, and just works without breaking if the user does some random thing. So, that's where these frameworks come in. Um, they're JavaScript. They're all JavaScript, but they kind of have their own dynamic to them, like kind of their own language and their way of doing things. If I was to pick one to learn, I'd pick Angular. I I honestly think Angular's backbone is barely ahead in terms of how many jobs are out there right now. U but there's a lot of jobs, a lot of people looking for Angular developers now. It's almost even and in the next couple years, I think Angular is just going to be more popular. Google makes Angular. It's kind of one of the big reasons. Um, but seriously, if you learn one of these, well, people are looking for Backbone.js developer. That's an actual job title. AngularJS developer. Um, learn one of these. Learn how to make a single page web app with these things. Um, and then if you want to learn both, it'll just make you available for more jobs. And then whichever one you learn, I put Knockout on there because it's it's kind of popular. It's it's enough to be mentioned. And there's a bunch of other ones that that are out there that sure they're great to learn. Ember and other stuff, but hey, you're learning. Pick one of these two. Unit testing. Whatever you do, learn how to write tests for your application and your framework. It's going to look different for Angular. It's going to look different for Backbone. Um, this is kind of like phase two. You can get a job without knowing unit testing. Uh, it'll just kind of show that you're a true pro if you know how to write tests for your application. And I'll leave it at that. This is not a video where I'm going to get into what that is. So, that's the that's the gonna be the toughest part right there. learn a JavaScript framework. Um, and learn jQuery. You got to know jQuery, but that's not really a framework. Uh, that's just kind of kind of falls into basic front end. Um, you got to learn from there a CSS tool. These are really easy. These aren't languages. They're tools. SAS less stylus. Basically, you're writing CSS for all intents of purposes, but you can do some cool stuff like create variables and and have it reuse certain parts of your code so you don't have to write it for everything. uh not going to go into it. It's pretty easy to learn it in a few days. SAS is the one to learn. Less is almost identical. For all intents and purposes, it's almost the exact same thing. Um and then you want to learn a CSS framework, which is Bootstrap or Foundation are pretty much the two most popular. Um Bootstrap, I have a video out for that. I'll throw it in the description. Uh what these let you do is these let you write with very little code uh a responsive web app. like a web app that just looks cool, looks clean. They give you a lot of built-in CSS rules to help you build widgets and build page layouts so you're not having to hand code all this. And it also sets you up to where you can build it and tell the next developer, hey, I did this with Bootstrap. And they know how to go find information from Bootstrap on how and why you did what you did. Um, and that kind of falls into responsive design. You need to know what this is and how to do it. responsive design is I don't know if you've seen all the new web pages now if you resize your browser the layout of the page changes to fit the size of screen you have so if you pull it up on an iPad the page looks different um and if you have a small browser window it looks different um images are smaller or bigger that's called responsive design uh you got to know that now it's not it's not super complicated you can really learn it in a couple weeks um and Bootstrap and Foundation are both responsive frameworks so if you learn them you're kind of learning learning responsive design. So, that's a tool that's not really so much a language. And then front-end build tools. These are just little tools that you got to learn. So, remember how I mentioned if you're building a whole JavaScript application, you're going to have thousands of lines of code sometimes, and you don't want them all in one file. That's a disaster. So, you got to split them up into a bunch of different JavaScript files. Maybe one for your header, one for your footer, one for your sidebar, one for your profile, one for your tweets listing. Um, and then you want to be able to build those together into one compressed JavaScript file. So you're only sending your browser one file instead of 20 or 100 files. And so that's kind of where your build tool runs in. These all run on the command line, which is why you got to learn the command line. And that's going to run either Grunt or Gulp. Grunt is basically the popular big dog that's been out for years. Everybody everybody uses Grunt. Gulp is the new guy that's I think a lot easier to use and it's basically a replacement for Grunt. Um, learn Grunt first. Take a look at Gulp. Basically, what this is going to do is you get a bunch of Grunt will listen and as you save a JavaScript file, it'll then compress all the JavaScript files together and spit it out and reload your web page real time. So, that's kind of what Grunt does. Um, as you save your SAS file, it'll process it and turn it into a CSS file. That's kind of the what Grunt does. Um, and then Yommen.io. Yomen uses Grunt. Uh, and that's just kind of a fun thing. Look into that. Bower is package management. Package management is becoming a really big deal. Uh, you don't want to have to give people a jQuery file and a backbone.js file. You just want to say, "Hey, download the project. The project has a package file that says you'll need jQuery, Backbone, all that." you got to learn basically what package management means. Um, and so instead of putting all those files in your project, you just put a package on it, which is just usually three lines of code that says when you run install, get backbone, get jQuery, get SAS, get Grunt, get all these things, and then your project's ready to go on your machine. So, got to kind of learn about Bower and package management. And then browserify and require.js. Learn how to use one or the other of these. Ideally, both. Require.js has been the popular guy for a while, but browserfi is, I think, a lot better. And a lot of people are going to be using this guy in the future and already are. Um, I'll leave that for now. So, that's front-end developer. Hopefully, I didn't freak you out so far, but if you want to go front-end developer route, this is stuff that I so wish somebody had told me years ago. I had to figure this out over the course of time. Um, let's say you're not that. You want to go backend developer. Woohoo. Backend developer. Uh, I want to do that. I want to be that server guy that works with databases. Um, here's basically a backend server is going to be running one of these technologies. It's going to be running Ruby on Rails, Node.js, which is JavaScript. A lot of guys like that. A lot of guys don't like that. PHP, Python, which Python usually runs Django. umn net which is going to be the C language um and you'll be writing unit tests for whatever technology you pick. If you're looking for jobs out there, there's a ton of Ruby on Rails jobs, absolute ton of Ruby on Rails jobs. A growing number of NodeJS jobs because it's really cool to be able to write JavaScript on the front end and JavaScript on the back end. Um I love Node. Node is my favorite uh because I started out as a front-end developer. Um Node is super cool. A lot of PHP jobs, they don't tend to pay as well because it's uh a lot more people know PHP and uh it tends to not be as used for super highlevel super large sites. Some people are going to hate me for saying that, but if you're looking for jobs and you're you're saying, "Hey, just tell me which one to pick." I'd say go Ruby on Rails. Go Ruby on Rails. Um Node.js. If you already know JavaScript um and you like JavaScript a lot, I I'd say pick one of these two. uh learn some PHP, learn WordPress, learn um Symphony or you know there's a lot of PHP has a ton of um frameworks out there for it. Ruby on Rails is the framework. Um and NodeJS is going to be writing JavaScript and you'll be writing it with Express.js. Um I actually have a video for getting started on Express.js. It's not really for super beginners. It's kind of for back-end developers already, but I'll put that in the description. Um, once you pick your backend technology, you're going to want to learn how to wire that up. I'm going to move this out of the way here. You're going to want to learn how to wire that up into different databases. Uh, so say you picked Ruby on Rails. Yippee. I want to be a Ruby on Rails developer. Learn how Ruby on Rails talks to a MySQL database. Once you've learned that, uh, learn how it talks to a MongoDB database. It's probably not going to be a world of difference. They're you're getting information or you're saving information to the database. Um, then learn how it saves stuff to a Reddis database. Um, those are kind of the big three to learn right now. There's probably 10 or 20. You don't have to learn them all. Just get comfortable with more than one and get over the fear of of working with a database. Uh, that's kind of, you know, you want to learn how to talk to a database. And then you want to learn some other things is how do I build a restful service now? How do I build an API? So, JavaScript can talk to me and say, "Give me 10 tweets." And I'm going to build an API, uh, a web service that JavaScript can talk to that will help them retrieve tweets from the database through my service. Learn how to build services. Um, usually any tutorial on Ruby on Rails will teach you how to do this. Uh, learn how to do security. Do some Googling on Ruby on Rails security. Ruby on Rails security best practices. Learn what stupid mistakes not to make with Ruby. That will leave your website vulnerable. Uh, next thing, learn about OOTH, too. Uh, have you ever seen those things that say, "Hey, log in with my Google account, login with my Facebook account." That's called OOTH. Uh, that is so popular right now. You want to know how someone can log into your application with their Google account, with their Facebook account. Which brings us to authorization, authentication. You want to learn what those are, what the difference is between the two. pretty easy, straightforward. Learn how to make a username password login on Ruby and Rails. Uh that's called um your authentication. Uh and then learn how to restrict people from certain parts of your site unless they're authenticated, unless they're logged in. That's called authorization. Learn how to restrict them from getting uh to tweets unless they're logged in. Make sure learn how to restrict someone from posting to someone else's Twitter account unless they're logged in as that person. That's all authorization stuff. Um, so learn how that works. And then the last thing on that is you want to learn caching, learn um, I won't go into it too much, but learn memcached, learn engine X. Too high level to leave for this conversation, but you want to learn some of these caching things. Varnish and squid are also good. I threw those on there if you just want to learn a ton. Are you overwhelmed yet? Are you freaking out? There's, if you look at it, you don't have to learn everything on here. Learn one. Pick one. I picked Ruby on Rails. Learn how to tie it into one or more databases. Learn a couple things. That's your learning curve for the next two years. Go for it. And then you're going to be hired and people are going to love you because you know the right stuff. Um, if you're a back-end guy and you're super loving backend and you want to go to a higher level, um, look into DevOps. DevOps is basically server management. How do I manage? I have such a big website that I have to have 20 different servers to handle all the traffic. What do people use when they're doing that kind of stuff? That's like DevOps world. That's like backend part two. I'm not going to go into that because most of you guys probably aren't anywhere near that world. But if you are and you want to learn it, there's your list of stuff to learn, your different tools that you'll uh use in those arenas. So, that's it. I hope I didn't freak you out and overwhelm you. It's okay if you have to watch this video four times to not get crazy overwhelmed, but if you pick one of these tracks and learn the technologies, you're good to go. You're going to get hired. You're going to be a person that people want on their team because these are the technologies that people are using right now. This is what it takes to be a web developer in 2014. And hope you liked it. Have an awesome day.