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General Discussion

Warner Cyr
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Warner Cyr
Front End Web Development Techdegree Graduate 21,047 Points
Posted by Warner Cyr
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Warner Cyr
Front End Web Development Techdegree Graduate 21,047 Points

Starting a new career as a web developer.

Hello everyone, How can I best use Treehouse to begin a new career as a web developer? I have a little experience as a print designer but virtually none when it comes to web design. Are all the tools that I need here to eventually land me an entry level job?

2 Answers

Bryan Peters
Bryan Peters
11,996 Points
Bryan Peters
Bryan Peters
11,996 Points

My 2 cents as a web app developer of 15+ years, coming back for "refresher" training on the modern web stack...

The good news is that you can get a great foundation of knowledge and resources here that can save you months, possibly years of self-study. I wish I had this kind of resource when I began my career.

The forums here are a great source for challenges - fixing someone else's broken site is a great way to augment your learning. They are also a great source for feedback on your own work.

The truth is that you will need to dig deeper that what is required in the courses, and really go experiment and explore the documentation for the technologies covered here. This is a critical skill for a web developer, as the field is broad and constantly changing.

The courses here are good for someone developing for the modern browser at acompany with modern tech. I don't think there is enough emphasis on techniques for handling older browsers. Spend some time supporting older internally-developed corporate apps that haven't yet been migrated off of IE7, and you'll find that a lot of the new cool libraries and frameworks aren't going to be there to save you.

Make sure you check everything you do in multiple browsers and platforms and screen sizes. After hand-coding for a while, the differences between browsers and browser versions will REALLY make you appreciate the libraries and stacks that are truly cross-browser.

The quizzes/code challenges so far are VERY easy compared to problems I run into in the real world. I would like them to have a course just on advanced debugging, where they give you a large set of site code, and have you go find and fix issues in it using the browser tools. Unless you are freelancing, the chances that you will code complete sites from scratch are low. Many entry-level web jobs are maintaining and augmenting existing sites. These skills are critical as well, and I feel are underrepresented in the curriculum here.