One of Stephen Covey’s “7 Habits of Effective People” is:
“Begin with the end in mind.”
When you do, what you need to do now becomes much more clear. It’s the same with your web development career. A lot of people ask me what languages they should learn and what order they should learn them in.
The real answer is:
I don’t know.
That depends on your end.
Here’s what I mean.
If you want to work at Google, for example, Golang might be something you wanted to learn since it’s developed by Google. If you want to work at Facebook, you might dive into learning Hack and React.
But, if you’re a freelancer…
None of those languages will help you all that much.
A lot of start-ups use Node.
Java is big in the corporate world.
See where I’m going with this? Depending on what career path you want to take, different languages are going to be more or less important. The truth of this is there’s no one path… contrary to what some of the know-it-alls in the dev community say.
But, even taking a step back from that.
Frameworks and applications affect this, too.
If you want to work with WordPress, you’ll need to learn PHP.
If you really like Django, then probably oughta learn Python.
Node, Angular and Vue? Learn JavaScript.
The thing to think about is this:
“On a daily basis, what are the kinds of projects I want to work on? Who do I want to work on them for? And, what tools do I want to use?” When you figure that out, the languages you need to learn become obvious.
And no.
Your answers probably won’t be perfect the first time.
You’ll try this and hate it.
Realize you love this other thing you thought you’d hate.
Etc.
But, if you just keep assessing it.
Keep asking the right questions.
You’ll settle into a groove.
The one thing you absolutely DO NOT want to do is waste your time trying to find the “one right path” or over-worrying about career prospects and all that. COBOL is almost 60 years old and largely obsolete.
Yet, there’s still over 1,000 COBOL jobs on Indeed.com right now.
In any case, if you think it through and HTML, CSS, JavaScript, PHP and MySQL are in your “stack”, then check out my curriculum over on SkillShare. I’ll teach you all that and you can get access to it for free.
Link for all the details on that is at: https://johnmorrisonline.com/skillshare
Later,
John
