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

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

#1

Post by neonnoodle »

I’m a self-taught web coder and have made some small CRUD systems for very targeted tiny clients during my professional life. I have also made a few hobby sites for fun just for myself.

I’d like to expand my skill set but I have trouble visualizing all the moving parts of a “big” web app and all the tools that go into it—when people talk about containers, or testing, or deploying such-and-such, I don’t have a clue. With HTML/CSS/JS, I can spin up a little demo to play around and learn on another personal/toy project, but how do I, as a solo person, learn about larger-scale technologies?

I’m a visual artist and print-based technician so front-end would probably be the place to focus. Is there a recommended path for going from hobby projects & small sites to larger-scale best practices in React/another important platform?

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

#4

Post by sandstrom »

johncoltrane wrote: post #2

You won't get there if you stay solo, so get hired, join a team and learn as much as you can from your peers. Large-scale is team-scale.

Yeah, this is the answer.

To add to this, for the "large scale technologies" you're interested in, remember that there aren't many individuals that knows it all (and neither will you!).

Senior engineers and CTOs will have a rudimentary knowledge of a lot of the moving pieces, but it's primarily a team effort. Even if you "knew it all", you wouldn't have enough hours in the day to keep it all up to date and running. Running any larger piece of software is a team effort.

But as a member of a team you'll still get a much better idea of all the pieces, even though you won't be able to master them all.

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

#5

Post by throwaway984393 »

Take a gander at MediaWiki https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/How_to_become_a_MediaWiki_hac... https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/New_Developers It's the code of Wikipedia, which is a big honkin' scale, mostly-modern web application. Read through those pages, join their IRC channel, ask them how you might get involved from the perspective of your current experience. The fantastic thing about open source websites is you don't have to "get hired", you just pitch in! :) And if you do contribute, it's great experience for your resume.

You can also look around for overviews of web architectures. You're gonna wanna lean about software design/architecture in general, and branch out to learn about all the components of a modern web application. You can find all the components used in MediaWiki I'm sure!

Personally I've been wanting to learn how to build Progressive Web Applications so I can make some apps for my phone without having to learn Java.

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

#8

Post by baalimago »

A lot of the web stack is analogous to "real" stuff.

Practice your database skills by implementing some project using indexedDB [1]. Practice your parallelization/efficiency skills by implementing some webworkers [2]. Practice your IAM skills by implementing some oauth2 API for some website [3]. And so forth.

Look here [4] for most (if not all?) the web stack things which you could experiment with, many of which will reflect back at "the real thing". I've done this and it introduces concepts in a good way. It also forces a "natural" progression towards backend when you have to deal with stuff like https/self signed certificates, websockets and so forth.

[1]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/IndexedDB_A... [2]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Web_Workers... [3]: https://developers.google.com/identity/protocols/oauth2 [4]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API

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

#9

Post by kettleballroll »

Yo! I'm mostly doing back-end development as a hobby and to learn some new tech (ai researcher by trade), and I'm looking to join forces with a front end person to work on larger projects. Shoot me a message if you're up to it, we can explore this space together. (Mind you, I'm doing this as a hobby, so time commitment varies a lot.)

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

#10

Post by csbartus »

johncoltrane wrote: post #2

You won't get there if you stay solo, so get hired, join a team and learn as much as you can from your peers. Large-scale is team-scale.

You’ll get there also alone, if that’s your type. Artists are independent, self learners.

What I suggest for front-end is a component based approach: React, Vue, Svelte, Lit. Components are a new paradigm, there are here to stay. I also suggest to learn “The new responsive” from web.dev - in the same way the future.

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