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Ask HN: Self-taught webdev with lots of free time. What should I learn?

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Re: Ask HN: Self-taught webdev with lots of free time. What should I learn?

#251

Post by dkubb »

bszupnick wrote: post #57
_benj wrote: post #34

I'm a self-taught webdev too and I would strongly recommend learning SQL, not just `SELECT * ...` but really learning it! I've been digging into postgreSQL and in quite a few applications it's possible to greatly reduce the complexity of the backend by receiving exactly the data you need from the DB. It is so much so that in cases you can even "get rid" of the backend completely (yes, no writing controllers and endpo…

Any specific resources to recommend?

I would recommend SQL and Relational Theory by CJ Date.

It completely changed how I use SQL. Before reading it, I had about a decade of experience with SQL. I didn't really understand the theory underneath. I also didn't understand how to write SQL in a way that adheres to the theory.

You can think of this book as being the closest we have to "SQL: The Good Parts".

Re: Ask HN: Self-taught webdev with lots of free time. What should I learn?

#252

Post by dharmab »

thatcodingdude wrote: post #224
alexdowad wrote: post #216

Suggestion: Dig in to the very bottom of your computing stack and get a working knowledge of your CPU, bootloader, OS kernel, system libraries, etc. Along the way, you will want to try: - Using a debugger to step through simple programs at the machine level and see what happens to the registers, stack, etc - Using tracing tools like strace (for Linux) to see what syscalls various programs issue (this is after you lea…

Do you recommend any books / courses that could help give me some sort of curriculum around this knowledge ? I unfortunately don't know what I don't know, so I'd need a bit of guidance to learn efficiently. Something like http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~remzi/OSTEP/ maybe ?

A great place to start before diving into books would be Ben Eater's videos on YouTube.

https://eater.net/

Re: Ask HN: Self-taught webdev with lots of free time. What should I learn?

#253

Post by jcaguilar »

ChefboyOG wrote: post #142

TL;DR: There's probably not an obvious, "learn this and you'll increase your job prospects" technology for you at this point. But, you can also decide to learn almost anything, and because of your years of experience, open up a ton of new doors. I'm also a self-taught engineer (well, I've done course work now, but only years after starting in the field). If I'm reading this right, I think you're in a position where t…

This is a great reply. Reminds me of this post "How to Become the Best in the World at Something": https://forge.medium.com/how-to-become-the-best-in-the-world...

Re: Ask HN: Self-taught webdev with lots of free time. What should I learn?

#254

Post by thettiguy »

jameslk wrote: post #135

Web performance This is an underappreciated field that lends to plenty of consulting. As the web becomes more complex, with heavy frontend code, third party services, and demanding amounts of images and videos, it's requiring a deeper understanding about networking and browsers to keep the web performant. Compounding the problem is the growing number of users who use mobile devices to browse the web, which have large…

I work for a company that optimizes page load times via a js library. We target mainly e-commerce. It’s crazy to learn how much money e-commerce will spend to improve website speed knowing it has a lift on their conversion rate.

With googles page speed insights / lighthouse gaining popularity (mainly just because its google and not much else), there is definitely opportunity to focus on just improving those results and be paid very well.

the load/onload/document complete event is very mature with studies correlating conversion rate. I don’t believe googles “web vitals” have been tied to any meaningful business metrics... yet.

Re: Ask HN: Self-taught webdev with lots of free time. What should I learn?

#255

Post by slowwriter »

frequentnapper wrote: post #36
thatcodingdude wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What kind of projects are you taking on with Rust ?

not op, but there was a post today about how to build single page apps using Rust on the front page: http://www.sheshbabu.com/posts/rust-wasm-yew-single-page-app...

I read that one too with great interest. I’m still only learning and reading, though. I’m hoping someday I’ll be able to use Rust in some professional capacity, but for now it’s just to have fun and play with something new.

Re: Ask HN: Self-taught webdev with lots of free time. What should I learn?

#256

Post by karmakaze »

A different perspective on the server-side of things might be useful. Could either go lighter like Firebase, or thicker like Rails/Ruby, Django/Python, Phoenix/Elixir, or Yii/PHP. They have more structure and let you tune things differently.

Certainly being exposed to working in a functional style with immutable data can benefit your thinking even when using common languages. I prefer the static type-inference flavors, e.g. F#, OCaml, or Haskell which is a bit more of a stretch. SICP/Scheme is great or even playing around with Clojure.

Re: Ask HN: Self-taught webdev with lots of free time. What should I learn?

#257

Post by alexdowad »

thatcodingdude wrote: post #224
alexdowad wrote: post #216

Suggestion: Dig in to the very bottom of your computing stack and get a working knowledge of your CPU, bootloader, OS kernel, system libraries, etc. Along the way, you will want to try: - Using a debugger to step through simple programs at the machine level and see what happens to the registers, stack, etc - Using tracing tools like strace (for Linux) to see what syscalls various programs issue (this is after you lea…

Do you recommend any books / courses that could help give me some sort of curriculum around this knowledge ? I unfortunately don't know what I don't know, so I'd need a bit of guidance to learn efficiently. Something like http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~remzi/OSTEP/ maybe ?

Please feel free to privmail me and I will try to share some ideas.

Re: Ask HN: Self-taught webdev with lots of free time. What should I learn?

#258

Post by iRobbery »

dgb23 wrote: post #156

Hi fellow self-taught web-dev with (almost) a decade of experience. Since we have no formal education we need/want to constantly learn new things in our free time. This is both fun and can be very impactful. Learning for us is a habit, or even kind of an obsession, but we should always look at topics with a pragmatic eye too. All of the things I list here helped me do a better job (qualitatively) in some way or anoth…

I would recommend webrtc too, its going to be a future for video stuff for a while in browsers and so on.

Re: Ask HN: Self-taught webdev with lots of free time. What should I learn?

#259

Post by paublyrne »

erdos4d wrote: post #250
paublyrne wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you don't want the kind of client who wants a website for $150. Good clients will be turned off by the low price. I'd try going for a less bargain basement look and pricing structure.

I live with my wife and son in Ecuador and 150 is actually pretty competitive here. Our main competition charges 200 I think. But I agree with you that it is very low for the US/EU market.

I assumed you might be looking for clients in the US. If that's the case I do think it pays to price yourself up rather than down.

Re: Ask HN: Self-taught webdev with lots of free time. What should I learn?

#260

Post by mcv »

zatel wrote: post #235
mcv wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another option is to learn Graph Databases. I notice there's still a big shortage in people with Graph DB experience, and they're not that hard to learn. Try Neo4J, for example.

As a self taught developer I also found Neo4j's query language (Cypher) to be way easier to read than sql. Especially for building complex relationships between data which I find to be kinda a pain in sql. Also the web interface for viewing your database is really easy to use. Although I should say I've switched to using more sql databases over the past year or two because there are way more hosting solutions that su…

Exactly. SQL is great for data that's mostly tabular, but despite their name, relational databases are not great at dealing with relations. We had some queries that required 10 joins. The same query in Cypher is trivial.

But yes, hosting solutions are terrible at supporting graph databases. Some do have a thin Graph DB layer (often using Gremlin as QL) over a Mongo-like database, but it's not the same thing.

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