Hey guys,
I am really loving the way Devmag.io community is building up. I like the fact that people are talking about casual stuff and asking questions without being judged.
Since there are many aspiring developers these days who want to code, let's share our own experiences on how we started learning web programming (HTML,CSS,JS). I think this will help them follow the right career path as well.
Looking forward to reading some interesting stories. :)
Keep coding.
My way how I became a web developer was a bit chaotic.
I started with 12 years to design my own pages with photoshop. They looked miserably but i was proud of them. Back then, I had a friend who was a really good programmer (or i thought it, can't really say something about his skills now) and he transformed my .ps files into templates for different CMSs.
After a while he told me, that he will go on tour as a concert pianist, so he will not be able to create my templates. I was really sad about it, and asked if he could show me how to do it my self.
He told me, that it was not so easy and he couldn't teach it to me in this short time, but he has a tool, with which i can get some viewable results.
In the tool you could load an image, slice it, and the tool would make a html template out of it.
That was my first contact witch html and later css.
Long time I did nothing else. I went to a technical school were we learned html and css (which i already knew already) and today I have to say... our teacher just read an online blog and had the smallest knowledge of the theme possible.
When i was in the 12. class I realised i was about to fail the school. So I left it, without a graduation and started to look for a job. No one wanted me, of course. Who wants a dude without graduation, who whants to be... a media designer. Jear, honestly. I wanted to be a media designer.
My father told me some day the the university had an open position as web developer (training). I applied for the position and because of a friend of a friend, i also got it.
I was so good at what I did, that my trainer offered me to shorten the trainee. So, after two and a half years I was a web developer.
When I think back it's really nice how everything played together. I never wanted to become a web developer. I wanted to work as an event manager, than as a system administrator, than as a media designer. But in the end, i got the right job and i couldn't be more happy about it... except i would be a youtuber, or a pro gamer... or a power ranger batman!
I never had a computer until high-school, we were doing Pascal initially in computer class and I got bored, got a copy of Delphi and started building free desktop applications that was useful to other people. It wasn't till my final year of high-school that we got dial-up internet and a new world emerged for me. Varsity, I was studying Engineering Science (Computer Science + Applied Maths + Electronic Entineering), first year, I was selling computers to help cover the cost of my studies, only in my second year did I discover that I could personally build websites and only another year later did I find some time to setup a PHP forum, restyle it and created my first web page. Varsity actually gave me internet access and would spend almost all my time on it since it was completely new to me.
My first ever web page was this one back in 2006, it never had much content on it: web.archive.org/web/20061005144731/http://www.myc… As you can see, it's still all tables and inline colours, CSS was still the new kid on the block and browsers was just starting to support to.
It's only in 2007 that I started building useful stuff on the web: web.archive.org/web/20070317152233/http://www.myc…
In 2008 I built two sites that were paid projects, this is one of them: web.archive.org/web/20090423090753/http://www.pho… This was the second paid project I did, I see what I did in 2008 is still there exactly as I left it: audioauditing.com
2009 and onward I almost never touched a soldering iron again and focused solely on web development since I enjoyed it so much.
I picked up HTML in 1994, putting my first website online a year later. CSS wasn’t around back then. It lived on a tilde-domain since TLDs weren’t easily available and certainly not affordable. I learned everything i needed from a book, which has later turned into a website: selfhtml.org (It’s all written in german). The web was wild and small back then. :)
Three years back I didn't even know how to build a web page, I had a background in electrical engineering and some knowledge of BASIC and C. What really got me in to web applications were MOOCs started by couresera and udacity. Build your own Wiki was the very first course that I took and helped me a lot. It was taught by none other than Steve Huffman reddit founder. After completing couple of more courses like Intro into computer engineering, Programming foundations with Python, Programming Languages, I had a firm grasp on how things worked. Later I joined a very early stage start up company and built their platform on Django. Django's documentation is crisp, concise and one of the best resource for learning web development using Django.
Currently I am working as a full stack developer and have been using Ruby on Rails. Rails cast and Ruby Tapas have been really good resources as well. There are a lot of small tutorials on Tutsplus although these are paid, but would help a lot.
Depends on what you consider programming. I started making HTML things since 1996, you know: table layouts, no CSS, dial up connections. It was all static HTML with links and photos, nothing big.
I started off looking at source codes of other sites to see how they did it and shamelessly copied a lot.
Started working professionally in 2001 and learned CSS at the first company I worked for. At first it was a big hurdle, especially because the browsers back then weren't complaint, so you would think of a solution which then didn't work in 2 out of 3 browsers. This is in the time of IE 5, 5.5 and 6 (and Netscape!), so things have really improved since then ;)
Javascript was basically DHTML back then (remember Dynamic Drive?), no jQuery etc. That stuff all came later on.
From my point of view here's the things I would recommend:
That's about it really. :)
I love learning stuff. Unknowingly, I followed a methodology. After learning different domains, now I call it 'zoo theory of learning'. You will know if you learnt a programming language from 'Hello World' (especially C programming language through the book by Kernighan & Ritchie). It goes like this,
Because of this method, I always look for a good tutorial that takes me from an absolute beginner level to a decent level. For learning Flask, a python framework, that tutorial would be, the The mega flask tutorial by Miguel. He takes you from writing a hello world to deployment in about 18 lessons.
I hope I have not abstracted the answer too much. BTW, I wrote about this method at my blog. You can read it there (Not much details than this answer).
I started learning HTML and CSS 5 years back. Just like every beginner I went to the W3Schools and TutorialsPoints. As I was always inclined towards designing, I didn't dive deep into JavaScript. However, I quickly understood how jQuery worked and some of its popular animation functions.
If you are just starting to learn web programming, you should follow the following websites
Hmmm... It seems like I have been doing web-programming all along, so I had to rack my brains to remember when was the first time.
It was circa 1998!
CSS support was rudimentary and so were HTML forms. Static websites were OK, but to dynamically generate pages there were very few options. We used Java Servlets and did everything in doGet or doPost. Perl-CGI or DLLs running within IIS would have been the only other alternative.
So we kind of did everything ourselves. What everyone assumes is available today was just not there. We didn't have ORMs, MVC frameworks, templating engines, Javascript libraries, CSS frameworks. The only saving grace was that there were only two browsers to test with: IE and Netscape, and Quirksmode was one of my favourite websites.
I have written my own HTTP server in perl, written CGI based dynamic web-servers in apache / bash / xslt, created my own templating engine in perl and even a rudimentary ORM in Java. It felt like whenever we needed a more efficient way of doing things, we invented something but soon enough it became available as an open-source library or framework. Then we would switch.
All that has helped me learn what goes under the hood of all the good stuff that's available today, and it also makes it easy to understand when something new comes up.
If any of you are just starting out, I'd advise something similar: Build your own web-server, write your own stuff at the lowest level (ie, without jquery / jsp / angular or bootstrap) to understand how things work. Write your own Ajax calls and generate your own cache headers.
Once you have done that, then the rest is a breeze.