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General Discussion

Posted by Haroon Arif
Haroon Arif
1,534 Points

Some career/learning advice please!

Hi everyone!

So yesterday I took the plunge and signed up to 'Tree-House'. I recently discovered I have a passion for website development and it could be a very appealing career path for me.

I'm currently at university studying 'Games Programming'. This course has taught me a vast amount to do with programming which up until a year ago I hadn't known anything about. However currently I am unsure whether I would like to work in the games industry when I finish my degree, so I am trying to keep my options open. I understand that if I want to go down the website development route I will have to be self taught.

I am familiar with programming languages and from doing some initial research into website development I see that I must know JavaScript & jQuery etc. (Listed below are languages I have learnt from university).

  1. C#
  2. JavaScript 3.C++ & C (Which I will begin learning next week when the new term begins).

So having said all this, I enrolled onto the 'How to make a website' course. So far so good, I am starting to understand HTML & CSS. I have also watched a variety of YouTube tutorials etc. I've looked at jobs to do with website development and have looked at the specific criteria a lot of them ask for so I understand what I must aim to learn. I.E PHP5, MySQL, Bootstrap, Grunt/Gulp, Ruby, Angular.JS.

I guess the next logical step would be to actually start putting the knowledge I am learning from Treehouse and other sources to use. Should I start building up a portfolio website which could contain work which can demonstrate my abilities? I'd like some guidance on how to structure this, should I start with the basics of web development and slowly build upon my knowledge? I've also seen that some jobs want their web developers to know some design and UX. This part scares me a little as my artistic ability is fairly bland, and from the portfolio examples I've seen around the web, the artistic ability shown on the website is fantastic! So I'd really like some guidance in this area please.

Sorry for the long post & rambling, any advice is greatly appreciated!

P.S The courses are fantastic and have motivated me to learn as much as possible!

4 Answers

Kristopher Van Sant
PLUS
Kristopher Van Sant
Courses Plus Student 18,830 Points
Kristopher Van Sant
Kristopher Van Sant
Courses Plus Student 18,830 Points

Hey there!

Sounds like you already know what you want to do and what you need to do to get there. I would first decide if you want to focus on Front-End or Back-End Web Development. Front-End being HTML, CSS, JavaScript(JQuery). Back-End being Ruby, PHP, MySqL etc. There is also the option of being a "Full-Stack Developer" which means you are familiar with both Front-End and Back-End technologies, however it takes years of experience to get to that point. Don't burn yourself out though by trying to learn everything at once!

I would definitely start building up a portfolio website and show off what you're working on. It doesn't have to be perfect! Just something where people can see what you're doing, who you are, and how they can reach you. It doesn't have to look like some epic glorious showcase of projects, you are just starting out after all. Also when you google web developer portfolios it typically shows some pretty awesome ones, which means those folks have a good amount of experience and didn't just build their portfolio yesterday. Their portfolios were most likely not that exciting when they first started out too.

If you aren't wanting to touch the design and UX portions of web development right now, then maybe focus on Back-End since many(but not all) Front-End jobs do want folks to have UI and UX and experience as well, or at least an "eye for design".

Hope that helps a tad. These are just my thoughts though! So hopefully someone else will chime in as well :)

Hooray for learning new awesome things! Happy coding!

Oliver Sewell
Oliver Sewell
16,425 Points
Oliver Sewell
Oliver Sewell
16,425 Points

hi Haroon , building a portfolio would be a great way to learn html / css and you could incorperate some of the javascript and jquery you know t, it should be fairly simple to learn jquery if you know javascript. ive been doing the web development and the web design tracks and keep switching between the two , it keeps your progress each time you switch back so thats good! , also if you search in the library css or html their are more courses i recommend making notes after each video. If you need any help with anything just ask on the forum :) you can learn artistic ability just like code i recommend the photoshop and illustrator tutorials and the ux design ones

Zain Abiddin
Zain Abiddin
2,783 Points
Zain Abiddin
Zain Abiddin
2,783 Points

Hey Haroon,

I would absolutely start building your own brand by having a portfolio website. Also taking on freelancing projects to build a portfolio is another great way to open up new opportunities for yourself.

Cheers,

Zain

Haroon Arif
Haroon Arif
1,534 Points
Haroon Arif
Haroon Arif
1,534 Points

Thanks for all the advice guys, really insightful. I think I will add to my list of things to learn some design & UX courses as I'd like to see what it involves.