Hello! My name is Jared Rice, and one of my many titles is a “Web Developer”. Here is why I am writing this article; During the final semester of my college degree, I found myself —very fortunately—holding onto a job. I was wildly unprepared.
Let’s take a step back. During my few programming courses, I really enjoyed the concept. I thought, “You know, maybe I could be that guy who programs his calculator or makes his own computer games” You always hear about these stories in tech culture, or at least I did. Countless tales of these incredible, self-taught developers who could do stuff that no one understood. That’s what I expected from my courses.
In reality, I was a mediocre programmer. I didn’t learn how to program any calculators and I could actually program some computer games, but that’s a topic for a different day. Anyways, it could have been blamed on my professor or maybe because I didn’t read the books. Regardless, all was bleak until I took my first HTML course.
This was my first time with a non-object Oriented Programming Language and it just made too much sense. Three years of Java will do that to a Liberal Arts student.
If you are trying to become a developer or a programmer of any kind and you have not learned HTML yet, this is your first step. Do you remember your first love? It’s exciting, sometimes confusing, and perhaps once you’re comfortable things start moving really really fast? That’s HTML.
Anyways, here we are 2 years out of college, having learned pretty much all of my web development skills during my job. And what I have learned is this; there is no right way to becoming a web developer. Being a “web developer” can mean very–very different responsibilities depending on who you work for and how you regard yourself.