Ask HN: Moving from tiny websites to serious tech skills?

How about contributing to an open source code base for a backend or frontend web framework? Since a lot of these projects are built with scaling in mind and have often reached complexities far beyond the capabilities of a singular developer to write himself, learning how they work in depth can give you the opportunity to significantly "level up" your skills in an area adjacent to HTML/CSS/JS.

If you don't know where to begin, you can start by reading the issues and pull requests for the project on GitHub, where there is often a discussion of how to solve problems from multiple different perspectives. When you've lurked around for a while and feel like you have something to say, consider commenting and starting communication with other people working on the project. When you hang around long enough and even start making pull requests of your own, you'll have newfound expertise and new contacts to ask questions who might already be experts in the technology you wish to become an expert in.

If the original poster's goal is just to learn about things, this seems like a good answer. I would recommend trying one new thing at a time, though, rather than trying to do it all in one experiment. So if you want to move from your current vanilla html/js/css to a multi-tier-with-database, some framework (react/vue/whatever) and containers...pick one to start with.

You could, for example, deploy your existing simple stuff using k3s, a single-host, local, simplified kubernetes. Or spend $10-$30/month on a cheap hosted k8s instance, like digital ocean.

Or, leave your deployment as-is, and just tackle moving from vanilla html/css/js to vue or react.

I'm a solo coder in my private time and work at a big Enterprise full-time.

Keep it simple for your own. Use git, but you don't need CI. ( VS has an awesome publish option for example)

Know the tools you know and use them required. Sometimes there are frameworks that help you speedup coding *5 ( eg. A screenshot from a web page is much easier through node), but i know c# the best. So 85% of my projects are in. Net.

If you don't know a backend framework. Consider RoR because of it's scaffolding. Do you work on Windows, give Visual Studio community a try. Pick a framework that is batteries included ( registration, login ) without jwt in the beginning.

For my projects after work, using asp.net MVC with EF and using scaffolding is a 500% quicker turnaround ( easy) than using any SPA framework.

Don't do cloud, it's expensive and for enterprise. Self-Host with a cheap VPS. Maintenance isn't as much as many claim. Implement some security measures! ( Private key ssh, firewall ( is always free)... )

What's your goal? Create your projects as cheap as possible and as fast as possible, if it doesn't gain traction. Then you could take above into consideration and use boring technology ( http://boringtechnology.club/ )

Is it purely to learn? Do some certifications about the cloud and spend halve a year learning non transferable skills with vendor lock in ( AWS, Azure, GKE, ...)

In addition to the many other suggestions here, there's plenty of ways to practice improving your current apps. Some examples I can think of from your description:

How are you doing deployments right now? Do you have a bunch of manual steps that have to happen in the right order, can you do a rollback quickly if you have to? Try learning some better deployment technologies that fix those problems. You might not have been bitten hard by any of them yet, but you never know when it could happen.

How about logging and monitoring, have you integrated with any tools that could allow you to monitor performance and error rates from all of your sites? That's also worth doing if you haven't already.

Are you using source control best-practices and CI/CD systems? Are your repos set up such that a new contributor could get onboarded to them easily? If not, do that. Try spinning up a VM or something and getting your repos set up on them, and fix or clarify as many manual steps as possible.

I was like you 7 years ago (graphic designer and did some small websites), and best thing I did was taking my savings and doing a coding bootcamp (Dev Bootcamp in SF).

It helped me understand what stuff I still needed to learn, and how to work in a team. Also helped my confidence, seeing that I was able to work with other people, some of them had already jobs as programmers, and solve problems with them.

After that I decided to work for others, but I could as well had continued doing frontend master courses and stuff like that, I think the Bootcamp taught me the "glue" between technologies, and how to think like a programmer.

There are a lot of online Bootcamps now, so no need to go to another country like I did, I'd look for some bootcamp where you work together with other students, and that has great mentors with industry experience.