Only you can learn web development!
Tags: webdev
Published: 2020-04-14 08:20:10

<i>This post is for anybody looking to finally take up web development. Be it as a hobby that you hope to turn into a career, or to just code, because you love to code but don't really know what to do with it. But it is relevant to anybody who is a developer.</i>

So you start searching for ways to learn this new thing that has peaked your interest, but you quickly realize that there are virtually thousands upon thousands of video lectures, Udemy courses, Coursera courses, edX courses, <i>well you get the point</i>, and you are lost within the tremendous pile of content that you've decided to throw yourself into. So you may choose to back off a little and see what google suggests you learn first. But once you start doing that, you're rapidly slipping into the rabbit hole that is the endless stream of requirements that google searches tell you to acquire before you can call yourself a <strong>web developer<strong>.

So after a couple of hours, you turn to the good old trusty Youtube suggestions to see if there's a comprehensible video from a fairly popular source that can help you navigate these confusing waters that you find yourself in, and to be fair there is a ton of videos freely available on Youtube, that can concisely tell you what you need to do, but the problem here is that you don't really know which advice to follow.

So after a day's worth of research you've decided that you'll follow a tutorial you found on Youtube to build your first dynamic web application, using either <i>Flask</i> or <i>Django</i> or <i>Node.js</i> or <i>Ruby on rails</i>, and I digress. But at this point of time you have no clue what any of these jargon mean, so you just follow along with the tutorial of choice and manage to build the exact same app as the instructor, albeit on your local environment. You are thrilled! You feel a sense of achievement! You feel like you've done the most important part of the process of learning web dev, you've built something!

But, then, you see this video pop up in the suggestions that is also claiming to be beginner friendly, it also has a good number of views on it, and it has positive comments about it helping people learn easily. So onward you go, you click it, follow that tutorial for the next couple of days, and once again, <i>you've done it!</i> You have managed to replicate the app in the tutorial. The obvious question to ask would be <b>"What next?"</b>, right? Well, at this point of time you are starting to realize that going on a hunt for videos to learn from, is a bit of a challenge, so it ought to be better if you complete a course on one of the many sites that offer them.

So you find yourself going through that tutorial for the next <i>couple of months</i> (or weeks, or days, it can vary) and at the end of it, <b>you've become a web developer!</b>

If only it were as easy as that! The point of this post is not to tell you to follow a specific course, or a tutorial series, there are numerous other such posts already available. The point of this post is to warn you about something that's often called <i>tutorial hell</i> or <i>tutorial purgatory</i>, and that just means that you feel like your skills are available to you only when you are following a tutorial, and that you are not a good enough developer when you try and build something <b>on your own</b>. The reason this comes up is because usually all our paths of becoming a web developer are different, but they always depend on the same sources of information. 

So, what about that title? It just means that no matter how you learn full stack development, at the end of it all, only you can truly gauge what you need to learn and what you need to do next. The only way you can be happy with your work as a web developer is if you build stuff you actually want to! Might seem trivial, but it can go a long way. Oh and by the way, the journey that I've tried to convey in this post, is one that I have happened to go through, that may not accurately describe yours, <b>but that was the entire point of this post!<b>