The 2019 Web Developer Roadmap
Everything you should learn to become a successful Web Developer in 2019
“Becoming a Web Developer is getting harder and harder as each year passes. More and more tools enter the market and this simply results in you having to learn more and more things in order to compete in the job market”
Okay, so while there is a bit of truth to the statement above, it’s massively overblown because you really don’t need to try to master a ton of different things to become a good developer. Learning lots of things will give you an appreciation of the toolset available, but ultimately, if you’re new to the world of web development, the key things you need to learn are as follows:
HTML + CSS + JavaScript
and that’s it!
Learn HTML so that you know how to structure a website, learn CSS so that you know how to style a website, and learn JavaScript so that you can begin to understand programming and add some interactivity to your website.
Get to grips with these and then you can decide to learn a JS framework or library, such as React!
Learn how to install Node as this will install npm, which you can then use to install create-react-app, so that you can build a React web application.
For learning React, I strongly advise that you use create-react-app in order to take advantage of all of the preexisting setup it has in place (as this means you can hold off on learning Babel, Webpack and a bunch of other bits).
Here are some useful links to get you started on your journey to Web Developer stardom:
HTML:
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML
CSS:
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/css
JavaScript:
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/javascript
Node/npm:
React (create-react-app)*:
https://www.codecademy.com/articles/how-to-create-a-react-app
*You can choose to learn Angular or Vue instead if you want. I just picked React because I think it will present you with more job opportunities than the other two.
Now some people are definitely going to argue with this list for a whole host of reasons: eg. What about databases? What about preprocessors? What about testing? You should use [insert framework] instead of React, the list goes on!
But you’re at the start of your developer journey and time is on your side!
The mistake I initially made when learning how to code was that I was too impatient. I’d try to learn a different thing every other week, moving on from one framework or language to the next, without taking the time to focus on specific things. This diluted my knowledge and made me okay at a bunch of things but not good at anything in particular.
So my advice to you is learn the things I have mentioned and learn them well.
Focus on these and you WILL be able to find a job.
Now go out there and build all the things!
Oh, but before you do, please leave some claps (pro tip: you can leave up to 50!)
