Developers: If you had to start your coding career over, what would you do differently?
Interested in hearing what you all have to say!
Would you choose a different starting language? Pick a different area of development? Choose a completely different career path?
When I was starting, I tried to learn too many things at once. HTML, CSS, JS, PHP (for WordPress) probably fragmented my focus even more by following tutorials on C++ and other languages used in random tutorials that I found while going down the Youtube rabbit hole.
If I could do it all over again, I would take it a bit easier and follow a roadmap similar to this one:
https://roadmap.sh/frontend
Yes! It’s a great resource. So many unnecessary things I focused on during my web dev journey…
Market was very different back then with a lot of technologies that were all viable. Now I think the market is just JS (I love Python), but JS is so useful.
Very true. JS ftw!
One thing I learnt well over a decade ago was that being a developer meant you often DO have to start over, and over and over.. my career kicked off in 1999 as a online application developer writing network application software in Java.
The fact is that the number of frameworks and languages I’ve used/needed to learn over the past 20+ years means that starting over is just part of the deal.
Developers (full stack and/or cross platform) have had to continually learn new tech, new languages, new ways to do (mostly) the same thing 😂 .
If you couple that length of career with wanting to move upwards or across ways, you end up running servers doing Sysadmin on Unix and Linux, figuring out Project management, Dev team management, Product management, people wrangling and of course managing up!
In “development” starting over is perpetual!
Of course you can try and avoid it if you want - pigeon hole yourself, “become T shaped” #cough# what a load of shite! Become a “front end dev” if you want to limit the blast radius (just an example - nothing against FEDs!)
Developer is a never ending role of learning. Embrace it , or run away quickly 😊
Couldn’t agree more! I’ve only been a frontend dev for 4 years and every time I learn something new and apply it, I get that “rush”.
Can’t wait to see where this takes me!
For me, I’d stay with web development but would not spend so much focus on html and css in the beginning. I think I over-stretched the learning process more than I should have.
I also would’ve only watched one or two tutorials on new topics and then jump straight into building projects!
I agree with you Brayden. I made the mistake of going through tutorial hell.