Should you choose to learn front end or back end web development? It’s a very personal question. By personal, I mean that it’s unique to you, not private. I’ve struggled with this question for much of my career. I always considered myself to be half and half (full-stack) because I could never make up my mind, but, recently, I have been leaning toward front end web development. I now consider myself to be 60% front end, 40% back end. Yes, I’m not ready to fully commit to either side, yet. Knowing both has its advantages.
I’m okay with some parts of back end web development. In Laravel PHP, I enjoy setting up the controller, the model, the database migrations, and the services for doing logic stuff, but I’ve noticed one thing about the back end. There’s more troubleshooting. Something might not work, and you’ll have to troubleshoot why, especially when doing something new, and be warned. Back end web developers rarely do the same thing twice which means lots of new stuff and lots of troubleshooting. This troubleshooting doesn’t seem to happen on the front end as much for me. Sometimes it does, when a package doesn’t install correctly, or something breaks because of a version, but usually a quick internet search sets me on the right path.
I like to do the same thing twice or maybe even a couple times. If you can’t make up your mind, I’d say try out both and see which one you like better. Then, once you figure out which one you like better (JavaScript or a back end language like PHP), you can call yourself that but still play around on the other end.
Anyway, this was really just a brain dump. I’ll probably continue adding to this post because I think about it a lot.