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Careers in Web Development
18:06Web developers make the web dynamic and interactive. While the skills required to be a web developer seem difficult to accumulate, it is not impossible. This video gives a brief overview of the skills required to get started as well as information on how much you can make.
The early days of the web was filled with lots of static pages.
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These pages could display text and images, but offered no interactivity.
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Most of the websites we visit nowadays are dynamic web pages.
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They do all sorts of crazy things in the background and present us with
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new information that we can interact with.
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If you were to think of a website right now,
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there's a high chance you thought of a dynamic one.
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Facebook, the "New York Times," any blog—they're all dynamic.
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The magic that goes on in the background
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that allows these pages to be dynamic is because of the work of web developers.
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Web development, like web design,
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is a vast topic and has evolved into somewhat 2 distinct fields—
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front-end development and service side web development.
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To be a successful front-end developer,
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you need to have a thorough grasp of HTML,
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CSS, and JavaScript.
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On the service side,
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you should be good at programming and have a working knowledge
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of a scripting language like Ruby and databases, as well.
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Depending on the role you have,
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you will also be working with content management systems and
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e-commerce platforms.
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If you're out looking for a job as a web developer,
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you will sometimes run into roles such as programmer or back-end developer.
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These all mean the same thing.
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You will also see language-specific roles,
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such as Ruby or PHP developer.
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You might even see a job called
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web designer with the job duties of a web developer.
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In this case, the people in charge of hiring
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don't really know the difference.
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So make sure you understand what you're applying for.
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Let's hear from a few of our teachers on their experiences of starting out
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in the world of web development.
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[How did you get started in web development?]
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I got started in web development just
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because I kind of just grew up with computers and using the web.
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It was kind of the first programming
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environment I was really comfortable in.
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I never really did much programming in the normal sense.
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It was just—I kind of got on the web, and I wanted to have a website.
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It kind of progressed from there.
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I dissected other software on the Internet,
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so I worked a lot with modifying forum software and stuff.
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That's kind of where I learned PHP and JavaScript to start off with,
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and it kind of grew from there.
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I got started in web development
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when I was working in telephone support for an Internet service provider.
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In between calls, I started teaching myself PHP and MySQL,
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but it wasn't until after that job
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when I decided to go freelance—when I quit university.
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Then I started doing it professionally.
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I got started in web development actually very, very early.
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I started programming when I was very, very young.
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I sort of kept in sync with the web as it evolved.
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I started making web pages right around
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when Netscape 2.0 came out.
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I actually sent in a bug report to Netscape at the time telling them about pop-ups.
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[What was your first experience like?]
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My first professional job I actually got in college through the co-op program,
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and it was with a company nearby the school.
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I worked part-time.
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It was to build tools for hospitals to measure results.
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So it was a survey company.
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So I built a lot of tools that would help
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hospitals gauge where they were doing well
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and where they needed to improve.
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It was a lot of fun.
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I kept on top of the web industry,
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and I learned—I started out writing
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script in Perl.
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Then migrated over to PHP.
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This was all personal projects.
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Then after college, I started doing consulting professionally
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with Ruby on Rails.
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Well it was kind of scary because I was going freelance.
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I was very green—very newbie-like—with all these things.
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So I got this one client, which was taking up most of my time.
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Then I needed to find some other work.
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But that was quite difficult because you have to market yourself,
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and with a small portfolio from this one client
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it was quite difficult.
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So I felt like probably most people getting started in this industry—
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very anxious and not very self-confident.
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So you try and low-ball on prices.
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That results in—I don't think this ever really stops—
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people coming to you wanting you to build a website for them for free—
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for a cut of potential profits in the future.
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I tended to reject those just because if people
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have a business idea and they think it's worth it, then they should be willing
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to pay someone to build that site and product for them.
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Being technically minded,
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you tend to do a lot of the heavy lifting in those scenarios anyway.
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So it was quite difficult at first.
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But then I went to a small marketing agency
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and started my career path again—as it were—working through
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the industry from job to job,
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building a reputation for myself until where I am today.
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[What was your first work or project?]
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So I was a PHP developer for a marketing agency.
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I got the position by—well I didn't have much of that portfolio because of my
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limited self-employment beforehand.
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So I created a site to go in my portfolio that
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would be particularly interesting for that marketing company,
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which was—I worked with a text or SMS API
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where it posted to a URL.
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So I thought that would be kind of good for—
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they worked for rugby companies and other sports teams.
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So I thought that would tie in well with them.
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So when I did start working for them,
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I started working on their sport sites and other sites,
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and there was even people who had been working in a PHP developer role
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for a while, and I found that my self-taught skills
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and doing that stuff on my own,
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I was more skilled than they were, and they have been to university
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doing not necessarily a programming degree,
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but they'd been doing macromedia director
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and then went into this PHP afterwards.
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So I quickly found myself feeling more confident with the skillset that
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I was able to learn myself.
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I would say the first thing that got
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any real usage was when I worked at an apartment complex.
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I wrote a program to automatically generate
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bills for people when they moved out of their apartments.
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So I wrote a program to take all of our different inspections and automatically
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generate the bills for them.
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So that would be my first project that saw any real light of day.
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Other than that, most of my personal projects
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were just kind of learning how to do things
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like work with databases—nothing crazy—you know—little guest book apps.
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So—yeah—that would—I guess be my first real in the world project,
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even though I didn't start getting paid for consulting until later.
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[What skills do you need to work in the web development industry?]
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I'd say as a newbie,
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the best thing to be able to do is be able
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to read code and understand it
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because your first job isn't really going to
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be creating a new project from scratch.
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It very rarely is, even after a lot of time in the industry.
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You're going to spend a lot more time maintaining other projects.
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So being able to take a code base and start mentally modeling it
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so you can actually get some work done in it.
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Being able to read code—
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being able to read bad code,
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which a lot of the code is bad,
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and trying to understand it and figuring out
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as you go how you would make it better
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is—I think—the biggest skill—
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that and being able to communicate with other people.
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Because you're usually trying to fill a need,
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whether it's the need of a client or your employer or somebody else,
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you're usually building software to do something.
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So being able to communicate effectively
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with the people you're trying to help is really important.
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I would say probably the biggest skill
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to have as a web developer is being able to troubleshoot things quickly.
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When something goes wrong,
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it can be really tempting to check the same things over and over again.
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So learning how to troubleshoot things quickly and effectively is probably—
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I would say—the number one skill to have—not just with web development
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but in any kind of development.
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You know, it'll start with reading documentation and then
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experimenting and trying new things.
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I know it's kind of funny to say,
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but Googling for the error message you're getting is usually a pretty quick way
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to troubleshoot, but that's—I would say—probably the main one
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that separates a developer who can fix
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something quickly from someone who can't.
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Starting off in the web industry,
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you need to at least know HTML and CSS—
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the front-end stuff and really basic back-end stuff.
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You don't need to know—like a full web framework like Ruby on Rails
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or anything like that.
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You can get away—if you can talk to
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MySQL database with PHP
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and put information in and get it out,
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that's about it really.
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That's—some of the client work that you'll work on in a small to medium-sized
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agency are very much brochure websites,
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and you can secure those very simply.
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[How hard was it to learn these skills?]
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How hard was it to learn these skills?
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It's difficult to say because I'm still learning.
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I think for me learning has been something
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that's been fun and pretty easy to do.
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I definitely struggle with things,
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but I'm constantly learning—
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trying to learn better,
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and I think for me one of the best ways for me to learn was to do it in a way
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where I had to teach other people or teach myself
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because then it really helps you learn the material.
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That's probably why I got into teaching, as well.
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My learning style has a lot to do with
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being able to explain what I know at least to myself,
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and then being able to take that and talk to other people has been really effective
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in me being able to teach.
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Like anything else,
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it starts off a lot harder than it is as you go on.
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When you first start programming,
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it can be very intimidating when you encounter an error message
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or some sort of problem in your program.
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Once you learn how to fix it,
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kind of the act of going through that struggle
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of encountering errors, learning to fix them,
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learning to solve different types of problems
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starts to get much and much easier as you go on because you are able to
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generalize everything that you learn.
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I made a conscious effort to learn CSS
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because it was the proper way to do it.
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Before I was doing tables and table-based designs and things like that.
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That can take quite some time to grasp,
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but it's through actually trying in your own time.
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It's okay reading a book or a blog or a course,
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but you really need to start developing your own sites with these things.
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So that can take quite a while.
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But I would say I was comfortable within a couple of months of working at it.
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In terms of PHP and MySQL,
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it was fairly straightforward,
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but then again it's like I started when I
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was in my teens doing basic programming,
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using QuickBasic, which is a DOS-based programming language.
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So I had some concepts of conditional statements and subroutines or functions.
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So once you've really cracked your first language like PHP,
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it's easy to jump off that onto other things like Ruby, JavaScript—Java even.
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So once you know the basic building blocks of any programming language,
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you can branch out into all these other languages.
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[How do you keep up with the pace of the industry?]
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The way I keep up-to-date—
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generally I used to be very religiously
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following certain podcasts and tutorial sites.
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But eventually, it's just too much to process.
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Eventually—because the industry is moving so fast,
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it's hard to keep on top of all these things,
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What you learn this week
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may be out of date in 2 or 3 weeks' time,
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especially with all these open-source frameworks evolving
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and developing as new contributors come on-board.
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It's really hard to keep up with that pace.
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So you need to kind of extract
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and understand what's going on with NoGIS
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or that's good for many concurrent requests.
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Is it asynchronous?
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Whereas Ruby on Rails is a nice CRUD stack
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of tools that you can build APIs with and simple websites with.
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It's about choosing what battles you're going to tackle with these things.
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So if you want to learn Ruby on Rails,
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and it's particular to a project,
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follow the Ruby on Rails podcast and Ruby shows and things like that.
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But in a general sense, you keep looking at "Hacker News."
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Follow some of the frameworks
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main contributors on Twitter.
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Get a feel for what's going on,
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rather than the granular detail.
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These days it's really important to stay on top of blogs and what's going on
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professionally like with each new release of a web browser.
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More and more things are supported.
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It's important to stay on top of the latest specs.
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With a framework, such as Ruby on Rails,
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there are releases of it all the time.
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With sites like GitHub,
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you can keep track of all the changes being added to Rails,
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and then there's always people writing about what's new.
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So by constantly staying on top of that—
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listening to podcasts, reading industry standard blogs,
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you can keep a pretty good handle on what's going on—you know—
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watching thinks like the Treehouse show.
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That's a really good one to watch.
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How do I keep up?
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I don't know if I can keep up with the industry.
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Everything moves so fast.
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It's really the valuable—the skill to have is to be able to filter.
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Because more new things come out everyday
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that you can possibly use.
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So your time is best spent working on things
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that are going to pan out and be helpful.
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But knowing what those are is really the tough part.
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I don't always get that right.
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I've wasted my time learning tools that
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probably aren't very good,
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and I learn a new tool here and there.
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I just try to keep an eye on it.
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When I read about something,
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try to see if it's being used in practice—
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see if it's different from what I'm using—
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different enough to solve new problems.
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The things you want to identify when learning something new are if it solves
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the type of problem you have or if it solves an entirely new class of problems.
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Both are good because you can either improve what you're doing now
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or open yourself up to entirely new solutions by
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learning something, based on where it lies in that spectrum.
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[Do you enjoy your job as a web developer?]
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I definitely enjoy my job as a web developer
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because I get to build things,
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and that's always been my passion is building things,
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whether they're physical things—
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I was huge into Legos as a child
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and built robots in high school.
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Software development and web development
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in general has been a really awesome thing
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because it allows you to build things very
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quickly with very low or practically zero material cost.
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You can just come up with an idea some night
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and then just spend your time building it,
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and you've made this awesome thing just from your brain.
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I would say in general I do like working as a web developer because it's that
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instant feedback that you get from building a product that is either successful
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or interacts with a client and their users
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and just seeing that story play out is really good.
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I would say the bits that I don't enjoy
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about it are sometimes the clients that you have to take on out of necessity
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and to survive sometimes.
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But you always learn something from those interactions.
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I've definitely had projects that confirmed
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that web development is what I really like to do.
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When you wake up and you're energized
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to work on the project and even tempted to work on it after hours or when you're
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not working or when you think about it later.
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For me, that sort of let me know that I was doing the right thing.
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Like web design,
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web development is a fast-pace industry
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with a lot of demands,
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but you are definitely rewarded for it.
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An entry level developer with sufficient
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knowledge can expect to start at around 40 to 50 thousand dollars.
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Senior level developers with years of experience and leadership
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under their belt can earn upwards of 150 thousand dollars a year.
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If you like building things from scratch,
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but don't like messing with physical things or you love tech but prefer writing code
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to playing with pixels,
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then web development could definitely be the career for you.
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