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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?

#291

Post by bashwizard »

pakwa wrote: post #160
bashwizard wrote: post #20

Get into security, specifically web app security pentesting. You'll thank me later.

Curious - why do you suggest this field?

It's a rapidly growing field that has more jobs than people. Meaning, at this point if you have a solid dev background and strong practical skills in security you're most likely going to make bank.

While anecdoctally speaking, I know people who switched from senior dev positions at two of the FAANG companies to smaller security companies and basically doubled their income and making north of $500k/year.

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

#292

Post by RemingtonLak »

No shortage of great suggestions here. Lotsa knowledge pouring in!

So I'm there with you although not quite as extensive.

May I suggestion: mobile app? I'm just now trying to get into PWA using vue. I have quite few mobile ideas and trying to pick your fav child is hard ;-) But using a bit of Biz Intel, research is pointing me to certain direction.

Also why not make it side hustle? Check out indiehackers.com (I have no affiliation). Great motivation and inspiration.

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

#293

Post by ivanovb »

Ligrev wrote: post #247
linkjuice4all wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just moved out of the ad agency/SEO industry (using a semi-burner account for that reason) and back into full-stack development. In the past couple of years I put a lot of effort into performance analysis and improvement (mainly site speed but other critical factors) but got very little buy-in from my clients. I was also looking beyond basic "SEO metrics" and the cookie-cutter output from Google Page Speed test and…

It's incredibly popular in the ecommerce world where every 1kb reduced is a lot. Target large ones - they often use Salesforce Commerce Cloud, Hybris, BigCommerce, Magento. Also any business with embeddable products and SDKs. No one is happy to make their page heavier with a script they don't own. Fintech comes to mind. Analytics companies too. Anything with complex dashboards. Anything tailored to power users - CRMs…

Any recommendation on how to make the e-commerce world find you? And especially the large ones ?

I was thinking about scouring the web for e-commerce sites with bad performance and just send them a cold email with some simple actionable items.

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

#294

Post by sneeuwpopsneeuw »

thatcodingdude wrote: post #28
sneeuwpopsneeuw wrote: post #4

I quit webdev after 3 years and I'm now trying more and more thing in the gaming world. Mostly cpp and opengl. Emscripten(was) and WebGL are very nice to make shiny doodles. So maybe try one of those. Or make simple art with css.

Were you able to get a job or freelance gigs in the gaming field ?

I'm still studying Computing science right now and will start with a master in Game Technology next year. But it is really hard to get a job or do freelance work in the gaming field so no not yet but hopefully soon TM.

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

#295

Post by thatcodingdude »

bashwizard wrote: post #291
pakwa wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Curious - why do you suggest this field?

It's a rapidly growing field that has more jobs than people. Meaning, at this point if you have a solid dev background and strong practical skills in security you're most likely going to make bank. While anecdoctally speaking, I know people who switched from senior dev positions at two of the FAANG companies to smaller security companies and basically doubled their income and making north of $500k/year.

Any way to contact you for learning/career advice ?

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

#296

Post by A_Venom_Roll »

jakub_g wrote: post #161
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'm working as a webperf guy as a staff. I find the work interesting (although sometimes frustrating), but I'm not sure how many companies want to have full-time perf people onsite. As you mentioned, It's mostly consulting type of work now as far as I can tell (so might not be suitable to everyone), but maybe this will evolve or is already evolving (I've been only approached once for webperf onsite position on Linked…

This looks really interesting to gain some basic and intermediate knowledge in this field, thanks a lot.

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

#297

Post by bashwizard »

thatcodingdude wrote: post #295
bashwizard wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a rapidly growing field that has more jobs than people. Meaning, at this point if you have a solid dev background and strong practical skills in security you're most likely going to make bank. While anecdoctally speaking, I know people who switched from senior dev positions at two of the FAANG companies to smaller security companies and basically doubled their income and making north of $500k/year.

Any way to contact you for learning/career advice ?

What I can share is my roadmap how I manage to break into the field without any prior professional IT experience.

1) Linux. Learn it and live in it.

2) Linux servers and databases.

3) CompTIA Network+ (only for the knowledge, didn't bother getting the cert)

4) CompTIA Security+ (same as above)

5) OSCP certification (not a golden ticken by any means but it helps to bypass HR)

That's basically it. While going down that road I focused on hands-on practice by actually hacking into machines with the help of following resources:

A) Hack The box (hackthebox.eu)

B) PentesterLab (pentesterlab.com)

I also really like Portswigger's Web Security Academy (portswigger.net) and Try Hack Me (tryhackme.com) but they weren't around when I was starting out but I would definitely check them out, especially if I was completely new to security today.

All in all it took me roughly a year but get comfortable enough to start applying to junior pentesting positions and eventually I got hired.

There are probably better and easier ways to do it but that's how I did it at least.

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

#298

Post by melvinroest »

melvinroest wrote: post #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 challeng…

If I seem to create the impression, I am simply a user of hackthebox and a pentesting enthusiast :)

I'm not affiliated with it.

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

#299

Post by ahpearce »

_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…

That is not always a great idea. There is a reason APIs exist, and backend service layers exist on top of databases. It is a larger abstraction of the interface design pattern.

It only makes sense if you're absolutely sure you'll never need to extend or change the interaction between front-end and back-end.

Think just about schema migrations on the database. If you change your schema, you have to change your front-end. Maybe that's okay for the time, but that can get out of hand pretty quickly.

On the other hand, with a service layer, you could completely decouple that dependency on the front-end, by providing the front-end an interface (the service layer / API). The migrations on the database layer don't affect the front-end whatsoever, because the front-end communicates with the interface. You can change the underlying implementation without changing the front-end's interaction with the interface.

http://best-practice-software-engineering.ifs.tuwien.ac.at/p...

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

#300

Post by dbbk »

qorrect wrote: post #70
a_imho wrote: post #32

Entrepreneurship? Getting more technical has a diminishing ROI after 10 years. Or something completely orthogonal to computing. Something you enjoy. For fun.

> Entrepreneurship? Getting more technical has a diminishing ROI after 10 years. Does anyone do anything just for the hell of it anymore, or is it all driven by money?

Well money is a requirement to live, and if you can do what you enjoy and get paid the money you need to live doing it, what's the problem?
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