Does every developer need to be a web developer?
First of all, I know there are tools like Bubble and Stacker. But (at least as far as I lnow) they don't allow me to insert the custom logic I want, through code.
I code already, thus most of my ideas involve creating custom business logic, fetching data from APIs, doing specific transformations and so on.
I can do these things, but I always feel completely frozen to continue with these projects since when it comes to exposing them I need a website or app, which I won't be able to build. I have experience with Python, AWS, basic Devops and etc. Most of the work I've done has to do with Data Engineering. I have almost zero experience with JavaScript and any web framwork.
All I'm missing is Frontend knowledge? Is there a way to embedding my code inside some no-code tool to build sites like Bubble? Am I being silly for not wanting to learn some web skills to be able to expose my projects?
From the point of view I have, every maker who builds things has either knowledge of Swift/Kotlin or something like that to build apps or knowledge of frameworks like AngularJS/React etc. Do I REALLY need these things? Or starting from my Data Engineering skillset, I already have a good path?
I'm writing this post as a way of research, I hope to find people with similar anguish to mine (people who already program but not directly in web/apps) or people who already have experience with web/apps and know how to help me about on how to deal with this path of new technical knowledge.
The thinking sounds familiar to where I've been, even if not exactly the same, and what it feels like is that this is more of a mental hurdle rather than a technical, or knowledge/skill-based.
A key for me was to let go of the constant need to "feel" progress in terms of "productivity". Moving from a familiar area (where you immediately are productive) into a new one where just the decision fatigue makes progress hard is daunting. Too often I dipped my those in the new area but became frustrated (and stressed) about not making progress quickly enough.
The key was to let go of this artificial pressure by accepting that it takes some time to orient yourself and to allow yourself to be a beginner again.
Given your background, you have a huge advantage over someone starting of new. My recommendation is:
You'll see that your confidence will grow just after a couple of days/sessions, and once you feel you start to grasp something (even if a small part) you will feel the progress. Quite quickly you are there to put this knowledge in production, and build upon it. New parts and details will feel much easier to learn once you have this foundation.
Damn, thank you so much. I feel exactly that of being a mental hurdle instead of a technical problem.
I really like the feeling of learning a lot at once, which happens by entering a new field, but there really is this huge pressure.
I'll try to let got that and focus on learning.
This really helped a lot.
Absolutely not. For example, you could write code for embedded devices and then sell them on a Shopify site or something. There are tons of places that code runs, and the web is only one piece of it.
I don't think you need a frontend framework. Server-side rendering is still a thing. And these frameworks pay off on huge traffic volumes Google and Facebook have.
And I can suggest not to learn it from scratch (you want to go this road) but get one of the prebuilt starter kits for web apps, dissect it and adapt to your purposes. I collect these starter kits here https://github.com/smirnov-am/awesome-saas-boilerplates (I have my own but it uses server-side rendering, which again in my opinion is good enough for idea validation)
I think I am in the same boat but making some progress in learning. I'm mostly a backend developer in Python/Django. I did dabble in Swift/iOS for a couple years and actually shipped something that had users but life happened and I ended up falling behind and eventually letting the app flounder. Anyways, since then, I felt that I would hit wall after wall because of my lack of frontend development skills/knowledge.
I tried the route of "learn as you build", but once I got to the point of learning the JS portion of it, progress would halt and I would get discouraged or something else took my attention.
But, this year, I found fullstackopen.com. This course/tutorial has enlivened my hope to learn frontend development (along with more backend ... nodejs). It has simple examples but also has exercises which really helped me apply what I learned. It doesn't teach JS, but with your background, I can imagine that you would pick it up quick especially with some googling. For HTML and CSS, I really liked learnenough.com to get the basics.
I really liked another commenter's recommendation of focusing on learning and NOT trying to ship something (yet). Once I let go of "shipping" as a goal, I felt free to focus my time on learning and exploring the possibilities.
Good luck! Have fun learning!
Thats great, thanks for the words! Nice to see someone in kind of a similar path. I read somethings and I will be starting with NodeJS and React, that felt like the best/easiest path to build the things I'm thinking about. Indeed, the tip by @stpe was pretty cool!
So I was in nearly the exact same boat a few years ago when I decided to bite the bullet and learn JavaScript (node + react)
Nowadays there are no code tools that can help you build a front end. But if you want to build front ends of your own, there isn’t really a shortcut. The most straightforward path is to pick a project and start building it and you’ll learn along the way
I was hoping to read this. Do you remember if learning the front end part, already knowing code, took a long time? Are you still able to focus more on design logic and features than on the interface itself?
Thanks!
Already knowing code, it didn't take that long. The first project I took on was backend only using NodeJs and Express. This got me used to javascript. I had built backends in python before that.
Then I did a project in React. I remember struggling for a month with each, but after that it wasn't too bad