Web development and problem solving

ronald911 said:
Sure. I was just making a point.
Django and Rails however ships with SQLite by default. But since they are ORM based, you can simply just use that.

To be fair, I mostly use Mongodb these days, because it's quite smooth with NodeJS and I use Mongodb atlas for development - no local setup required as everything is cloud based.
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MongoDB + Node + Mongoose (+ Mongoose Compose for fun) + React will see you up and running in hours.
 
There are no bad programming languages, only bad programmers.
The Bad Programmer is the one who leaves a trail of destruction in his/her wake. Yes, this programmer has figured out how to make a three-hundred-line method called "get_stuff()" that has all sorts of nested try blocks, handles exceptions (all of them) by dropping them on the floor, and generally writes hard-to-understand Bad Code.
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JohnBeppu said:
Bad Programmers will be Bad Programmers in any language. I have a friend who will take your beautiful Python and make it his bitch. This is not a boast on my part - I'm actually rather disturbed. My point is that writing code in Python will not magically make my friend write beautiful code.
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http://wiki.c2.com/?BadProgrammer
 
23942329 said:
I'm 27 of age and have yet to decide on a career and was thinking of starting a web development gig and seeing whether or not it is for me. Up till now I've only been working for my father's company as a desk support nerd. I will first try the front-end of things and see whether or not I like it, if I do I would try to go full stack.

For the moment my only question is about the problem solving aspect of things and what exactly entails it. If web development is a form of programming and programming is defined in a number of contexts as creative problem solving within the constraints of computer technology, then what mathematical or logical problems am I expected to solve, and how would these problems change, in terms of both difficulty as well as their nature, over time as I get more experienced and my career progresses?

I would be very grateful if some real-world examples could be demonstrated as well as how I am to go about finding the solutions.

Thank you kindly for your time.
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To start a "web development gig" on your own with no dev experience is a tall challenge. I'd suggest play around a bit first with some pet projects while you still have your current day job and see if you like coding. Doing your own thing also involves other skills like sales and marketing. Most good developers are good at neither of these as we're typically introverts. No marketing = no sales = no clients to build web apps for = catch 22.

Modern front-end web dev has changed a lot and is no longer just CSS + HTML and a little JS to make buttons jump around. The new JS frameworks are striving to achieve proper OOP principals and geared to large projects and teams. You can definitely specialise in that today wihtout getting too involved in back-end and eventually full-stack. But here's another catch 22: if you're starting a small "web development gig" on your own, you don't have the luxury of just mowing lawn. You will have to be the cook, the driver, the cleaner AND the gardener!

As for problem solving, well, how did you solve problems as your father's desk support nerd? You got better at it as you got more knowlegable with the subject, e.g. PC's, printers, LANS etc, right? Writing code is the same. As you get to know more about what you do, the problem solving will become more natural. It will typically be logical issues like: how do get this layout to work just as well on a 8 inch mobile screen as it does on my 21 inch desktop monitor? OR why does the web server suddenly battle to make external API calls between 2 and 4 AM every morning? OR how do I prevent the user from resubmitting the same purchase twice? There is a new challenge or three every day.

I've been coding for many years and most of those in the financial industry where you'd think everything is about numbers. I have NEVER needed to use algebra or advanced mathematics to solve anything! Those kind of problems are rare in the web dev world, line of business programming and may other disciplines of programming. Unless you're getting into functional programming and doing things like process controls (but not even so much) or planning on becomming a game dev and writing your own graphic engines, I woudn't stress about math problems.

Sorry, I don't mean to discourage you. The success of self authoring web tools like FB Pages, Wix.com, WordPress, to name a few - has killed the market for small web start-ups. You now have to be the guy building the next WordPress etc. Small businesses no longer bother paying small web companies to build them a website anymore - they just DIY it using one of these services. Not sure on your exact idea, but all the fulltime web developers I know work for companies.
 
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flippakitten said:
There is a reason why Rails is famous with startups and that's because it lives up to it's reputation of quick MVP and maintainability and by the time the app is serving enough people where you need to start worrying about scale, you have enough money to pay for it. It's not only about the speed, it's also about investment.
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I heard this very argument asserted by numerous Rails devs... is it a DHH quote?
The argument has its merits, but personally I don't like it though. It fosters a "not-my-problem" mentality at the outset since it is assumed another technology will replace Rails when scale becomes the focus.
 
battletoad said:
I heard this very argument asserted by numerous Rails devs... is it a DHH quote?
The argument has its merits, but personally I don't like it though. It fosters a "not-my-problem" mentality at the outset since it is assumed another technology will replace Rails when scale becomes the focus.
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The point of that statement is you don't need to worry about scale because it's already been solved, you can create an app and know it can scale to your needs.
 
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