8 Things I Wish I’d Known When I Started as a Web Developer

I have been in web development for more than five years and it’s been quite a journey — trying out different technologies and experimenting with different styles. I’ve been successful at times, but I’ve also had my fair share of disappointment. In this post, I’m going to talk about certain realizations I’e had over the course of my life as a web developer, with the hope you can learn from my mistakes.

1. Write Clean Code

[caption id="attachment_96667" align="aligncenter" width="418"] Source: funny-memes.org[/caption]

The first thing you realize when you start making large applications is that a huge amount of time is required for debugging. Often, you’ll spend more time debugging than writing new code.

In such a situation, it’s highly important you write properly indented and commented code, which adheres to best practices. Imagine you have hundreds of lines of code, and you have no idea what’s causing a small bug. What’s worse is that if you write unreadable code, you’ll probably fail to understand what each snippet does after some time. Are you sure you want to go down that path?

2. Language first, framework later

[caption id="attachment_96668" align="aligncenter" width="416"] Source: Giphy[/caption]

People often first learn the tricks of a framework, and then move on to the language. That’s actually not the right way to go.

The popularity of Django can be attributed to the strengths of Python — so it’s important that you get comfortable with Python before trying out Django and not the other way round.

The simple reason here is that if you know about the underlying language, it helps you understand how the framework works. If you have no idea about the trades of a a language, there is no way you will understand why something is done a certain way in the framework.

Continue reading %8 Things I Wish I’d Known When I Started as a Web Developer%

by Shaumik Daityari via SitePoint