The Path to Web Development?

I'd personally start off with a Udemy course on special for R100. It's much cheaper and if you make it through the whole course you'll come out with a bunch of knowledge and know whether you actually want to pursue this without spending a lot of money. Either of these courses will get you going with all the basics. The first one uses PHP/Python/MySQL for the back-end whereas the second uses NodeJS. Perhaps do some research on, or even learn both. They're both good options.

HTML/CSS/PHP/Python/MySQL
https://www.udemy.com/the-complete-web-developer-course-2/

HTML/CSS/PHP/NodeJS
https://www.udemy.com/the-web-developer-bootcamp/
 
Get a job in an industry that relies on IT, such as banking, insurance. Start in operations, not marketing. Call center etc. Then work your way into support.

A significant number of developers I work with in the U.K. have got into software development following this path.

I didn’t start in software development either. I was an internal auditor first.

It’s really hard starting in software development with zero experience. The industry is the worse when it comes to training up newbies. Having work experience in the organisation is a good way to get the powers that be to enough faith in you that they will support you in getting skilled up if they know you. And if you have been studying it on your own time that helps to show them your commitment and they are more likely to take you on in this new role.
 
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zippy said:
Get a job in an industry that relies on IT, such as banking, insurance. Start in operations, not marketing. Call center etc. Then work your way into support.

A significant number of developers I work with in the U.K. have got into software development following this path.

I didn’t start in software development either. I was an internal auditor first.

It’s really hard starting in software development with zero experience. The industry is the worse when it comes to training up newbies. Having work experience in the organisation is a good way to get the powers that be to enough faith in you that they will support you in getting skilled up if they know you. And if you have been studying it on your own time that helps to show them your commitment and they are more likely to take you on in this new role.
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Do not start in banking.

And for the love of God do not start in support, it's a dead end job and you'll stay there for 5 years and earn fokhol.
 
Thank you all for your valuable input! :) I'll be starting out with the bootcamp mentioned by DarkDragon and go from there. :D
 
SirSlothXCI said:
Thank you all for your valuable input! :) I'll be starting out with the bootcamp mentioned by DarkDragon and go from there. :D
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One thing I always do when learning something new, is apply it to a real project for myself or a client. A bit of pressure / direction works wonders.
 
Thor said:
Do not start in banking.

And for the love of God do not start in support, it's a dead end job and you'll stay there for 5 years and earn fokhol.
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Maybe thats in SA. In the UK it seems very different. At least from the people I have met.
 
zippy said:
Maybe thats in SA. In the UK it seems very different. At least from the people I have met.
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Cannot compare a functional first world country to South Africa, especially not in Tech.
 
Thor said:
Cannot compare a functional first world country to South Africa, especially not in Tech.
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You can and should, especially since SA loses skills to these countries. Denial doesnt help :)
 
1) Do some free courses online and learn the basics.
2) Play around, a lot!
3) Build out a lot of different projects to try different things, have a big personal project that you build out to show progression and skill.
4) Enrol in a part time qualification if you are serious through a recognised institution like UNISA (this is not required but will show potential employers you are serious.
5) Have some publicly available projects on a github account.
6) Be someone that can cover all the bases, and not be a template modifier. The big bucks are for those that can actually do all the work.
7) There is a metric **** ton of stuff to know to be proficient, that is why good devs get paid well. Back in the day job descriptions used to be 3 lines (html, css, js) and now they are the length of the bible in size 2 font.
8) Dev is a constant learning and evolving process. You are never done learning because as soon as you know something well something better comes along. Come to peace with this and your life will be a lot easier. If you stop learning you're dead in the water.
 
Thor said:
Do not start in banking.

And for the love of God do not start in support, it's a dead end job and you'll stay there for 5 years and earn fokhol.
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Support gets your foot in the door. If you can't progress from there then its your own fault.
 
Bryn said:
It makes little to no difference that you don't have a degree. The web and design content covered in university is a joke, and most students are only capable of working with skeleton code anyway.

<snip>

On a related note, pay no mind to the people here hating on devs who use templates. It is insanity to take an approach that only original development should be used for all engagements. Most clients cannot afford the financial cost and time delay of that. At the very least, much of your own work will form templates that you reuse anyway. I don't necessarily recommend WordPress, as even the better implementations always seem to have something off about them, but Joomla 4 is amazing and will let you provide your clients will a very professional back-end for adding content.

<snip>
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I've said it many times before and will say it again, no you don't need a degree but it helps with the foundations of how to dev correctly. Universities aren't going to be up to date with the latest and greatest because that is not their job. They teach you from the ground up how to do things properly (architecturally) and you are supposed to apply your chosen/latest tech stacks. People who think universities must be the equivalent of little microsoft certification colleges of other certification houses have no clue what a university is for.

People are stating the whole thing about templates because so many people do wordpress sites, download a template and change a few lines and then the next thing you know they are applying for jobs as full stack developers. You are correct in that there is nothing wrong with it and it suits many use cases and client budgets but I think the underlying emphasis on this is that you can't hack a bit of what other people have done and think you are a proper software developer as doing only this type of thing does not provide the learning and advancement required to be a true software developer.
 
^^vampire^^ said:
I've said it many times before and will say it again, no you don't need a degree but it helps with the foundations of how to dev correctly. Universities aren't going to be up to date with the latest and greatest because that is not their job. They teach you from the ground up how to do things properly (architecturally) and you are supposed to apply your chosen/latest tech stacks. People who think universities must be the equivalent of little microsoft certification colleges of other certification houses have no clue what a university is for.

People are stating the whole thing about templates because so many people do wordpress sites, download a template and change a few lines and then the next thing you know they are applying for jobs as full stack developers. You are correct in that there is nothing wrong with it and it suits many use cases and client budgets but I think the underlying emphasis on this is that you can't hack a bit of what other people have done and think you are a proper software developer as doing only this type of thing does not provide the learning and advancement required to be a true software developer.
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It's easy to talk as if SA's universities are as good as some of the best in the world, but I've seen nothing to suggest that that is the case and a lot to suggest that it's the exact opposite.

Generally speaking,
1st year: hello world, basic console applications
2nd year: algorithms & data structures, still console
3rd year: more of 2nd year, abysmal projects, a few extra sprinkles like basic databases

Do you work at some elite SA university I'm not aware of? Because I'm fairly familiar with how woeful our university graduates are and would hazard a guess that 99% couldn't build a basic Windows app or website (worthy of a paying client) to save their life. The syllabi I've either had exposure to or have discussed with graduates absolutely do not get the foundations right. 2nd year and beyond does not bother providing context or use cases, info systems provides no deeper insight than Wikipedia, students parrot learn how to react to skeleton code, poorly designed web pages must be recreated with MVC skeleton code etc. Those who can't cope with the misery and idiocy of it all probably never realise it's a circus and not representative of the world of development, and have their passion crushed for no reason. I know a handful of people who rediscovered programming years after believing it wasn't for them, so this is something that annoys me more than just a little. You're hugely overselling the provided foundations, perhaps based on the performance of students who used sites like Udemy to get what they had hoped for all along.

It certainly is very important to have a strong foundational understanding of software development - we just disagree that an SA university is a place you're likely to get it. R5k on Udemy will utterly annihilate R100k at a university, by a truly interstellar margin. My point was that if you're going to be an entrepreneur, knowledge is the only thing that matters.
 
You're underselling what people get doing a degree, they do far more than the basics you list.

However you are correct in that most graduates are semi-useless. They're that way because universities teach little segments of theory with code, e.g. we'll now write a program that does X (hello world, db app, compiler, networking, asm etc). As a result they never learn end-to-end coding from taking a problem, breaking it down properly, looking into tech/languages/libraries, using different components/people, creating effective code that solves the problem (and in a given timeframe), proper testing, interacting with people etc.

The problem is that these students, given a Udemy course, will fare no better. Its only when they start trying to figure out what it is that they want to learn, and what it means and how to break that down for themselvels (and then learn it) that they truly become developers.
 
animal531 said:
You're underselling what people get doing a degree, they do far more than the basics you list.

However you are correct in that most graduates are semi-useless. They're that way because universities teach little segments of theory with code, e.g. we'll now write a program that does X (hello world, db app, compiler, networking, asm etc). As a result they never learn end-to-end coding from taking a problem, breaking it down properly, looking into tech/languages/libraries, using different components/people, creating effective code that solves the problem (and in a given timeframe), proper testing, interacting with people etc.

The problem is that these students, given a Udemy course, will fare no better. Its only when they start trying to figure out what it is that they want to learn, and what it means and how to break that down for themselvels (and then learn it) that they truly become developers.
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I don't think I'm underselling the situation even slightly.

Your argument seems to be that there is value in university for aspiring programmers. That's undeniable. My point was that the value is atrocious compared to quality online courses.

You don't need a university to 'send you in the right direction' or teach you logic. They're really bad at that anyway.

You're going to understand how the cogs fit together so much better, not to mention have so much more fun, when you're doing ambitious projects like Twitter clones or basic games after just a week or two. Good courses will always recommend other areas of interest worth checking out and even without recommendations you'll go looking to fill more gaps in your knowledge. It makes no sense to me to think that a struggling student wouldn't do better in a more stimulating and creative environment.

I've always seen Udemy a bit like the best Prof I ever had. His approach was to give the class the full toolset upfront. He showed exactly how everything worked and you were free to take all the notes in the world. Then he challenged the class to use those tools to impress him. Almost everyone scored 70-90 in tests and there was nearly 100% participation in the voluntary competition at the end of the year, with a high standard of submissions. His classes were full and had really good vibes.

Every single other Prof or lecturer took the opposite approach. Give the bare minimum in lectures, make a song and dance about challenging students, give totally new stuff in tests, put individual students on the spot frequently in lectures, provide very incomplete notes etc. Attendance was poor, morale was zero, students tried to hide away by slouching in their chairs, test results were awful, almost no participation in voluntary activities and in team work I found my classmates understood nothing. This approach of trying to drown students and see who will sink and who will swim just results in most drowning. I know people from other years and universities and we feel similarly.

Some people love the second approach. I know for sure that the overwhelming majority despise it and that it doesn't produce results. Udemy is the first method. That alone is why I strongly believe you're more likely to succeed as a budding programmer if you go that route.
 
It seems as though this discussion is crossing some thread topic boundaries here. Is a university education valuable for a web developer? For most web development I would expect so, but I would think it would be far less than knowledge, experience, etc., and I would also expect that for many people a more practical set of courses and practicals would be better for them.

For the more general case of development though, I believe this is a completely different question, with a completely different answer. Without the university experience, mathematical and CS theoretical background, the average person is at a disadvantage, which will alter the type of work they do for their first job, and likely send them on a less optimal career path.
 
Bryn said:
I don't think I'm underselling the situation even slightly.

Your argument seems to be that there is value in university for aspiring programmers. That's undeniable. My point was that the value is atrocious compared to quality online courses.

...

Some people love the second approach. I know for sure that the overwhelming majority despise it and that it doesn't produce results. Udemy is the first method. That alone is why I strongly believe you're more likely to succeed as a budding programmer if you go that route.
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Yeah, I'm not really disagreeing with you on the online courses. Any good online course can be mostly just as good as a decent uni class (depending on options for learning material, asking questions, finding followup info etc).

The problem for me is more with the classification of the people.
Those individuals who can't get the most out of e.g. a uni degree won't be talented or hungry enough to either pursue the online courses or be able to learn much from them anyway. For that generic bottom group (which we all have to deal with) I'd much rather have someone from a uni background (where they were forced to learn N subjects, but mostly suck at it) vs an online guy (who learned 1-2 subjects, but also suck at).

I find that the best people that really want to learn will do so with any material on hand. They can easily find and learn from free resources, work and play at it and will end up a lot better than either of the aforementioned group.
Personally that's the candidates I go for, but out there in the wider world lazy interviewers and recruiters tend to use degrees etc as a quick filtering tool...they often don't understand the value of someone that's really into something vs a casual who's just using it to make money (although also there are people who just code 8-5 and are really good at it).
 
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