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

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131–140 of 326 posts

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

#131

Mobile or desktop dev (not Electron or React Native). See how the other half lives. Last I checked Apple TV recommends a markup+JavaScript development process for standard TV streaming applications. It's not a web environment, but it should feel pretty familiar. Easy transition, knock out a demo app and you could start pulling contracts for that, maybe. Dunno how hot that market is. I'd second others with leveling up…

Yes. Native mobile would be a great side project coming from web dev. You'll learn new languages and tools which for me helped me become better web dev.

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

#132
Try XgeneCloud : https://github.com/xgenecloud/xgenecloud - its free & open source.

With XgeneCloud,

* You can generate REST/GraphQL APIs instantly on any database (MySQL, PG, MSSQL, SQLite)

* And deploy entire backend into a single Serverless function! (AWS Lambda, GCP CLoud fn, Azure Function Compute)

* Has a built in GUI tool for Database design and API debugging as well.

Idea is you get to pass the boring bits (CRUD et al) and invest time into business parts of application.

(Disclaimer : Im the creator)

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

#134
post #62

Please learn how to actually make money off web development and let me know how you do it. I've noticed a huge disconnect between what people think a web dev can/should make and what I've been able to get from it.

100% self-taught here. I change $150/hr for full stack Rails work and none of my clients have batted an eye at that. I’m thinking about raising my rates, actually. If you know what you’re doing, I can assure you, making money is not going to be one if your problems.

Wow, I must be a complete idiot with this stuff because I can't get people to give me even 150 bucks for a full website right now. How do you actually get these 150/hr clients? Please don't tell me I need to work in Silicon Valley for some years and get the "contacts", cause I don't want to live in the US anymore. Tell you what, here's my site: https://www.andeswebdesign.com, if you like it, just send me all your work and I'll do the whole site for you for an hour of your pay. I also have a PhD in computational and applied mathematics if you want to put some real deal data science pipeline in it! I've never made a cent off of that PhD either, so maybe you're the guy who breaks it all open for me.

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

#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 larger constraints on network and hardware than desktop users.

Additionally, web performance speaks to businesses because a "slow" website can impact your bottom line. There's lots of case studies about this: https://wpostats.com. For large companies with heavily-trafficked websites, this is critical as you're losing potential users/customers as a %.

Google has slowly been making it a bigger objective for websites to focus on SEO-wise, especially with their latest push around "web vitals." Therefore it's becoming a higher priority for marketing departments as well.

Web performance is not sexy and requires a lot of patience around analyzing websites to figure out why they're slow and coming up with specific optimizations for them. This is not like building websites. It's more like debugging. And it requires a pretty deep understanding of how websites load and run in browsers. Provided these things, I think that's partially why it's given so little attention and why so many websites perform terribly. If you're not deterred by these factors, there's a lot of businesses that could use this specialized expertise.

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

#137
Hey,

Let's meet up online and play hackthebox.eu together for a bit. My idea is to simply pick a live box and hack it together. You can pick the difficulty. I've done 6 years of CS degree programs (1 bachelor, 2 masters), 1.5 years of software engineering experience and done security courses (network security, hardware security and reverse engineering) as extracurricular subjects.

Anyone who feels up for the challenge, my email is in my profile.

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

#138
post #62

Please learn how to actually make money off web development and let me know how you do it. I've noticed a huge disconnect between what people think a web dev can/should make and what I've been able to get from it.

100% self-taught here. I change $150/hr for full stack Rails work and none of my clients have batted an eye at that. I’m thinking about raising my rates, actually. If you know what you’re doing, I can assure you, making money is not going to be one if your problems.

Could you expand on how long you've been doing it/how much experience you have, and how you go about finding clients? :)

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

#139

Hey, Let's meet up online and play hackthebox.eu together for a bit. My idea is to simply pick a live box and hack it together. You can pick the difficulty. I've done 6 years of CS degree programs (1 bachelor, 2 masters), 1.5 years of software engineering experience and done security courses (network security, hardware security and reverse engineering) as extracurricular subjects. Anyone who feels up for the challeng…

This is nice idea, see if you can use us to build interesting playgrounds on your site. We are in based in UK as well (Dorset).

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

#140
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…

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.
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