Before you start taking courses on web development, it’s a good idea to get an overview of what web development is, what a web developer does, and what tools a web developer has to learn.
What Is Web Development?
Web development is work on websites. Pretty simple, right? Each website is unique, and it takes a different amount of work and skills to build each one. Websites are a lot like physical structures. You can have a bird house or the Burj Khalifa (a really big building in the middle east). Just because you can build a bird house doesn’t mean you can build the Burj Khalifa. The bird house is like a simple, static HTML website. No programming needed. (Surprise! You don’t actually need to know how to program to build a website.) The Burj Khalifa is like Facebook. It requires thousands of skilled builders and hundreds of specific tools to build and maintain.
In addition to bird houses and Burj Khalifas, you can have dog houses, tiny homes, prefab trailer homes, single-family homes, mansions, castles, and on and on.
What Skills Does a Web Developer Need?
If you want to build a website, what kind of skills do you need?
The most important skill a web developer can have is problem-solving. That’s true for most professions but especially for web development.
Coding involves creativity and logic, but it mostly requires problem-solving. Many other parts of web development include problem-solving too, like why isn’t this tool doing what it’s supposed to do? Or why isn’t this thing turning on? If you’re worried that you don’t have this skill, don’t worry. It’s something you can learn.
Flexibility is another good skill to have because you’ll be learning a lot of new stuff. No, you won’t have to learn every programming language in existence, but you will have to learn your “stack” really well.
What Tools Does a Web Developer Need to Learn?
HTML, CSS, and JavaScript (the Front End/Client)
Like I mentioned with the bird house, you don’t actually need to know how to program to build a website. All you need to know is HTML, but you won’t get much out of it. At the bare minimum, the only tool a web developer needs is HTML. If all you want to build are brown bird houses, then that’s completely fine.
There’s another tool called CSS that web developers use to make their websites look nice. Think of it like paint for the bird house. It can be used to make any website look good.
The web developer’s bird house is sturdy, and it’s nice to look at, but it doesn’t do anything. The tool that web developers use to make their sites more interactive is called JavaScript. It makes your website feel like a real application. Think fancy slide shows, popups, and silky smooth transitions with every click. Your website is sturdy, beautiful, and interactive, but it’s still missing something very important. It’s missing a brain… But, you say, bird houses don’t have brains. And that’s correct. Unfortunately, this is where the structure analogy falls apart. We’ll have to pick up with another analogy. HTML, CSS, and JavaScript are like the skin and bones of the website, and the brain lives in the back end, also known as the server.
PHP, MySQL, and NginX (the Back End/Server)
PHP and MySQL are like the brain of a website. PHP is a programming language that you can use to process logic, and MySQL is a database you can use to store data. These both live on the server. All those other tools live on the client/front end.
The tool that connects the front end to the back end is called NginX, appropriately called a web server.
These are six tools a web developer should learn.
What Does a Web Developer Do?
Finally, what does a web developer do? We sit a lot. There’s not a lot of walking around as a web developer or heavy lifting. We sit, and we think. We also plan and collaborate with other web developers. But the main thing that a web developer does is code. When you click around a website and enter information, the web developer figures out how the website will respond and where the data will be saved. Building a website is a lot like building any other product that people will use. How will the product benefit users? Is the product easy to use, intuitive? Instead of using physical materials to build the product, the web developer uses digital tools like PHP and MySQL.