from Hacker News

Learning Web Development? Skills to Make You Stand Out

by cmorgan8506 on 5/2/18, 12:44 PM with 96 comments

  • by eranation on 5/2/18, 2:06 PM

    Adding to this: learn soft skills:

    - check yourself before blaming others, it might eventually be an issue in your code

    - beware of premature optimization. Spend that time on defensive code, comments and tests. Optimize based on measurements, not feelings

    - take notes when getting tasks and make sure you don’t miss anything

    - ask questions when stuck but don’t ask things before at least googling them once

    - under promise and over deliver

    - be nice and never argumentative

    - be humble when getting criticism and be merciful when giving one

    - count to ten before sending an angry / escalation email

    - understand that some people need to have things explained to them slowly and more than once, be patient

    - have some backbone eg, if your manager is wrong, tell them (in private!) but accept if they don’t agree, they have the final word.

    - be proactive and communacte your status and plans even if not asked to

    - don’t work yourself to death, have limits

  • by rdiddly on 5/2/18, 2:22 PM

    It's a good list, though these particular things are more about functioning at a basic level than standing out.

    Speaking more generally, the best reason to learn anything is always "so you can do shit" rather than some calculated competitive motivation to impress someone. The latter attitude reminds me of the 80s somehow, and yes I'm old enough to remember. It doesn't bring joy. Neither does being told there might be thousands (bold type and everything) of people competing with you. Just focus on mastery, have fun, and let "standing out" happen on its own.

  • by CiPHPerCoder on 5/2/18, 2:02 PM

    While I don't dispute that this article lists good knowledge to have, I don't think it qualifies as useful career advice (which seems to be the intention).

    Want to stand out in web development? Specialize in something useful that few other people are. The best way to do that is to learn some technology that all your peers hate.

    "Pfft Java? Nobody uses Java anymore, you should learn Vue.js instead it's the new hotness" + "Companies are still hiring Java programmers" -> Learn Java, the herd is going away from it but the demand is still there.

  • by ryannevius on 5/2/18, 2:03 PM

    Shouldn't most of these be standard skills that a web developer should know? I think _not_ knowing these things would make you stand out more than if you knew them (albeit, negatively). Perhaps I'm missing something...

  • by sailfast on 5/2/18, 2:46 PM

    These are all good skills to be proficient on day one.

    What I don't see listed that I would prioritize above some of these (because every environment is different so skills are sometimes different) is testing discipline. Have you written a unit test before? Can you write testable code?

    That is a much harder set of concepts to understand and would likely take awhile. Make sure what you put up is tested - that would separate you quite a bit.

  • by ovrdrv3 on 5/2/18, 4:21 PM

    > Get familiar with a command line text editor (vim, Emacs, nano, …).

    Can someone explain to me why it would be beneficial to learn these? Most of the time if you needed to edit some file couldn't you just <fav text editor here> file.*? I am trying to understand this. Thanks

  • by onion2k on 5/2/18, 2:13 PM

    I asked Web Developers across several communities what skills they thought were often neglected by new Web Developers

    Knowing git would be great, knowing HTTP would help if you're going to be working with APIs, and knowing dev tools would be useful if you're more front-end. I'm not sure the rest (networking, UNIX, another language and commenting code) are really things that would tip the balance in your favour.

    Particularly the additional language - I'm sure most web software companies would rather a candidate knew more about the main languages used to build web things (HTML, CSS, JS, [Node|Ruby|PHP], and SQL) than something 'extra' that they're unlikely to use if only one dev knows it.

  • by majewsky on 5/2/18, 2:06 PM

    One of these skills is apparently "making a website that's completely blank on my phone" (FF for Android with uBlock Origin).

  • by crunchlibrarian on 5/2/18, 3:06 PM

    Really? I haven't done web dev in many years but these were all skills I had mastered before even attempting to define what type of development I wanted to do.

    If web developers don't already all know this then what knowledge do they have nowadays? Just intimate trivia details of whatever framework/platform is hip this month? Is that all they work on?

  • by scarface74 on 5/2/18, 5:09 PM

    Remember, it’s not about learning a language that will get you a job. It’s about broadening your horizons as a developer and being able to recognize the right tool for the job.

    It's almodt always about getting a job. Why not concentrate on a language that makes you immediately employable?

  • by cryptozeus on 5/2/18, 2:13 PM

    I am a full stack dev in Microsoft world, been working with .net for 10+ year. Just started to gather skills to disconnect from ms and move my career fw as a front end dev.

    Thanks for putting together this list, it terrifies me !

  • by svdr on 5/2/18, 5:05 PM

  • by epx on 5/2/18, 3:19 PM

    My situation is opposite: I know many things but React/Vue/Angular. It is interesting how the remote job market turned away fast from mobile development. I have elected to learn React and Vue, hoping to bet on the right horses :)

  • by at-fates-hands on 5/2/18, 2:35 PM

    In most cases, you really don't need to know most of these. Depending on where you're working, most places have s dedicated team for networking, they have a whole teams dedicated to working on Linux servers, they have whole teams who only do database stuff.

    For me, these are more "nice to have" skills than anything that will make you stand out. You should know how HTTP works, you should know how to use GIT. If you doing any modern web development, you should already completely familiar with the command line.

    Most of the time when you talk with recruiters or hiring managers, they're looking for more of a "culture fit" which translate to developers with soft skills and a decent personality. A company can always mold a developer to how they do things and the tools they use, but it's a lot harder to change a shitty personality.

  • by digitalsushi on 5/2/18, 2:11 PM

    Are there any modern tricks for debugging against a TLS website? Last time I was doing it 5 years ago we did mitm proxies, ssl self-signed tricks, to get wireshark able to sniff and read the payload.

    Did anyone invent an easy way to do this?

  • by mythrwy on 5/2/18, 6:45 PM

    These skills seem pretty basic for a web developer to have for most part (git, know about HTTP verbs, be able to use browser debug tools).

    Are there many web developers who don't know about these things?

  • by poulsbohemian on 5/2/18, 5:17 PM

    FWIW: cmorgan8506, the OP, is a quality freelance developer. Would hire again.

  • by aditya5670 on 5/2/18, 3:29 PM