Entering the field of web development is an excellent choice and web developers are extremely high demand. This article will give you a good understanding of web development in order to pursue a career as a web developer.
Web development usually refers to activities related to website functionalities development. Although every website is developed little differently, there are three fundamental components that conduct every interaction between a user and the site.
Once the three fundamental components have been identified, you will clearly understand where web development ties into the entire process. The web developer plays a significant role by ensuring that when users interact with a website. It reacts in a certain manner.
When developing websites, there are specific project roles that have different responsibilities that are quite prominent.
Web designers are responsible for the appearance and usability of a website. They usually work with Adobe Photoshop, or Adobe Illustrator for design purposes and more advanced designers can build web prototypes using coding skills. Basic web designers are using languages such as HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. HTML is basically used to structure the website. For example, if you want to make a paragraph, list, button you have to do it with HTML. But, those basic elements are not enough attractive to catch the visitors. So web designers have to style them to make them attractive. That part is done by the CSS. Basically, it can be done just using CSS. But nowadays, there are pre-built CSS frameworks such as Bootstrap, Semantic, Foundation, Material CSS, etc. By using those frameworks web designers can easily make an attractive website without making big effort. And the most important thing is a lot of CSS frameworks are open-source. So web designers can customize it to fulfill their needs. And the next one is JavaScript. Basically, it is used to make events such as onClick, onFocusIn, onFocusOut. So web designers can customize the behavior of those events.
Front-end developers are the glue that holds web designers and back-end developers together. These people deal with client-side programing and applying designs they have received from web designers. Their main tools are HTML, CSS and JavaScript.
Back-end developers are those who work behind the scenes. They develop server-side logic, manage database connection, design APIs, handle security and authorization. The main tools they use our Ruby, Node.JS, PHP, Python, Go-lang, Java, Scala and a great deal more. Back-end developers also deal with databases. Some of the most popular databases include MySQL, Elasticsearch, Cassandra, Redis, and oracleDB.
A full-stack developer is a one-man army specialist that can work on both client and server-side and sometimes even a design. Mastery over different layers is in high demand. Understanding the problems of different project roles makes them a good fit for a potential team leader position.
In general, web developers are responsible for building and maintaining websites. You might think that web developers spend whole days working on their code. But it’s not necessarily true, while development is the biggest part of a developer’s job. There are other crucial tasks that need to be done.
Here are other important activities a web developer is involved in:
The analysis is a constant part of a web developers job. This involves talking with the client, gathering functional and non-functional requirements. This allows to look at a project from a bird’s eye view and then plan architecture properly.
Before new code is added to the main codebase. It usually undergoes a code review process. This is where other developers go through your code, review it and make suggestions for small fixes.
Once you have reached a certain level and expertise. You’re often expected to share your knowledge with others and train junior developers. This is usually followed by a Pair Programming in which to developers sit in front of one computer and attempt to solve problems together.
This usually involves solving random bugs and implementing small changes for an already working project.
Developers spend a lot of time meeting and talking not only when discussing new features with clients. Developers often organized daily status meetings where they discuss what did they manage to accomplish on a previous day and what are they going to do on that day.
No, absolutely not. In order to be a web developer you just need to have the passion about developing. Once you have the passion you can learn everything using internet.
