How to Learn Web Development as a Self Taught Developer

April 4, 2023

One question that I’ve been asked often is “How do I become a web developer?” There are many paths to becoming a web developer: you can go to a 4 year university and get a computer science degree. You can do a coding boot camp. You can enroll in online courses. You can teach yourself. Since I’ve only done one of these things, I’m not qualified to say which approach is going to be the “best”, and honestly, the answer might be different for different people.

I can try to give a little insight into what “web development” is, however, and one approach you could take if you were interested in learning web development as a “self taught” developer, since that is the route I took!

What is Web Development?

Web development can roughly be split into back end and front end development. A typical web app will involve a front end which lives on whatever device (phone, computer, tablet, etc) you are using, and a back end which sits on a server (basically another, more specialized, computer) somewhere. As you interact with the app, the front end will be sending requests to and receiving data from the back end.

Front end development is the part you see, and it’s primarily going to be HTML, CSS and Javascript. Very often developers will use frameworks that streamline a lot of the aspects of working with HTML, CSS and JS so you can build more sophisticated apps and websites quickly. At Lithium, we use Vue (front end JS Framework), Vite (Build tool) and Tailwind (CSS Framework) on top of HTML, CSS and JS.

The back end is the “server”. In Lithium’s apps, the back end is where we handle our database storage, emails, user authentication, etc. The back end can be written in PHP, Node (JS), .NET, and probably some other languages too. We build with a PHP Framework called Laravel. For our database communication we use MySQL.

How Do I Learn Web Development?

There’s a lot to wrap your head around here, but learning HTML, CSS and JS (or even better Typescript!) is typically going to be a good starting point. You could check out W3Schools for the basics. From there you could find a tutorial series on one of the common JS frameworks: This one is very good for Vue. Svelte and React are the other two major JS frameworks. Svelte is supposed to be a little easier to learn, and React much more challenging. The cool thing about learning React though is React Native, which gives you the ability to write Native Apps. I’ve also heard good things about: https://beginnerjavascript.com/ if you’d like to really master the fundamentals of JS before moving into a framework, something I wish I had done sometimes!

If your goal is to build sweet websites, you probably don’t need to dive too much into the back end world, but if you are interested in more sophisticated “web apps”, then you’ll want to learn some back end as well. Like I mentioned earlier, we use PHP with Laravel. PHP is a little bit of an “old dog” in web development, but there is nothing that compares to Laravel in the back end for building out sophisticated web app back ends quickly. We use this tutorial series at Lithium to get our new devs up and running. Node (js) is more trendy, and I can see the value in being able to use JS on your front end and back end. There are a ton of Node frameworks you could look into, but since we don’t work with Node, I’m not really sure which framework would be ideal to start with. There is also .NET, which a lot of “Enterprise” applications are built on. You’ll also want to learn the basics of a database query language such as MySQL if you plan on working in the back end.

One thing to note is there isn’t really a wrong answer for what “stack” you decide to start with since the skills you’ll learn in one language or framework will translate well to the next one. If you start with Vue, it’s not like you’ll be resetting back to zero if you decide to learn Svelte or React.

Once you’ve worked through the basics, one of the best things you can do will be to “scratch your own itch”. Use what you’ve learned to build yourself a website, then buy a domain (your-name.dev?) and figure out how to get your site online. From there you could get a little more sophisticated and see if you can build a full stack app like a blog, or some cool smart home stuff, or maybe something to help out a friend’s or parent’s business (or your own!).

One last note: there’s a lot of noise right now around ChatGPT and making web developers irrelevant. ChaptGPT is incredibly powerful, and I would definitely recommend learning to use it as you learn web dev. I don’t necessarily think it’s going to make web dev irrelevant though. I do think it’s going to make mediocre developers irrelevant, but it’s going to make the best developers even better. For example, if your special power is that you can turn a button on a page green when you hover over it, or that you can take a design and implement it, you are in danger. If your special power is that you can look at complex problems and come up with solutions, ChatGPT is only going to make you better.

If you’re interested in learning more about web development, don’t hesitate to shoot me an email at lason@lithiumdev.tech with any questions you might have.