4th May, 2008

How to Become a Great Web Developer

A few days ago a friend of mine asked me how he could improve his skills/knowledge of web application design and development. I had some recommendations for him, and it really got me thinking. How does one become a great web developer? It’s such a huge field that it’s hard to know where to start. Here’s what I’ve come up with so far:

Experience

I know many people are looking for a book, website or class that will make them a great web developer. After a lot of thought about how I became a (semi) decent web developer, experience really seemed to be reason why. You simply cannot become proficient at anything without doing it. A lot. And web development is no different.

Don’t believe all those “Teach Yourself X in 24 Hours” or WYSIWYG tools, you need lots of varied experience to become a great web developer. It’s rare having 1 job will teach you every part of web development, it’s such a huge field. The basic technologies/skills that are involved are HTML, CSS, JS, 1 back-end language minimum (PHP, Ruby, Python, Java, Perl), interface design, semantics, information architecture, systems architecture, database design and scalability. And that’s just a start!

Odds are you need about 2-3 years of experience before you can call yourself ‘experienced’. You need to write code, lots of code. Bad code, good code, messy code. Doesn’t really matter as long as you can look back at it in a few weeks/months and say “This code is crap!” (I do this frequently). You also need to break things, make mistakes and blow through a few deadlines before you can begin to understand the ’soft’ parts of software development.

Continually learn

I’ve heard this from lots of other bloggers and tech gurus. If you aren’t constantly learning and expanding your skill set, you will be left behind. Technology moves fast and keeping up is paramount.

Continually learning means everything from experimenting with new technologies, reading blogs and books to going to conferences and technology groups in your surrounding area. You need to expose yourself to as many new ideas as possible all the time. You are never ‘done’ learning and can take a break.

Being a web developer/programmer is like being a shark, you have to keep moving to stay alive.

Finally

Actually, that’s it. A lot less things to follow than I thought. Add comments if you have more ideas, I’m always interested in new information!

Things to read/check out


Don’t think that by reading these books and blogs you’ll instantly become a great web developer, I still consider myself average to above average.

Books
Blogs

Posted by: Ryan

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Responses

I think this truth is universal - not just for web development - reading a book about finance doesn´t make you a great investment banker and you are right that the only way to accomplish the state of being “skilled” in what you claim to be is to actually do it again and again - every day is a schoolday :-)

By: Drupal-Boy on May 5th, 2008
at 5:50 am

@Drupal-Boy

Yeah, it is universal that experience is the best teacher. But with programming it seems that the proliferation of ‘Teach Yourself X in 24 hours’ makes it seem that programming defies this rule.

By: Ryan on May 5th, 2008
at 10:45 am

I might not have seen it, but I’d definitely include a design patterns book on that list. if you are working on a complex system, and you are not at least familiar with common design patterns you are only hurting yourself. The Gang of Four book is of course the essential tome, but there are a ton of great design pattern books with examples in every language under the sun.

By: Chestone on May 5th, 2008
at 11:32 am

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