If you're an early-career developer, Twitter is overflowing with people tweeting great tips – and some absolute rubbish – about how to improve your skills and become better at your job. I've spoken to more than a few people who've asked me, "how should I start?". And I tell everyone the same thing: learn the basics.
However you learn best – book, video, interactive tutorial – you need to learn HTML and CSS before you can call yourself a web developer.
If you're an early-career developer, Twitter is overflowing with people tweeting great tips – and some absolute rubbish – about how to improve your skills and become better at your job. I've spoken to more than a few people who've asked me, "how should I start?". And I tell everyone the same thing: learn the basics. However you learn best – book, video, interactive tutorial – you need to learn HTML and CSS before you can call yourself a web developer. I don't think that's a particularly controversial statement. Once you start getting into interactive website territory, with API calls and fancy stuff, that's where you need JavaScript (JS) knowledge. More specifically, vanilla JS: plain JS with no additional frameworks or plugins. The JS that your browser understands without having to do any pre-processing. It makes working with frameworks a whole lot easier, and it'll help you to know when not to use a framework (and avoid making users download massive JS bundles when all you need is a tiny bit of code). Browsers have come a long way, and a lot of what we might have needed to use Babel to do even just a couple of years ago is now natively supported in the big 4 browsers (Chrome, Firefox, Edge and Safari). Where I started I started building websites when I was ten years old. I was lucky enough to grow up with computers in the house, and had a book called "Make Your Own Webpage" which taught me the basics of HTML (as it was in 1999). You can even read it on archive.org. A few years later, I built my personal website full of webrings and stolen gifs with the help of Lissa Explains It All, the ultimate HTML bible for anyone on the internet in 2002. (It's still online today, but pretty out of date!) Fast-forward through LiveJournal, Greymatter, Blogger, Wordpress, pretty much any pre-2010 blogging site/CMS framework you can imagine – and now I'm building websites (or web apps) as my actual job, using React. A fair bit has changed – but not as much as you'd…