Digging into the Developer's RoadMap

#1

2019 Web Developer’s Roadmap

While I know that at this point, the article is about a year old, I just took the time to read it and found it very helpful for gaining a good idea of what skills and knowledge are necessary. I am interested in at least gaining a comprehensive understanding of web development, and much of what I have learning or am currently learning seems to line up with the toolkit of the front end developer.

However, I thought I would ask a couple questions about the article, assuming that the 2020 version isn’t about to be posted in a week.

  1. Are these tools for any of the areas, not just front end, considered necessary before even beginning to look for developer work, or are they skills that you should develop as you advance in your career? In other words, are some of the more advanced skills expected to be learned on the job or before it?

  2. What is the general timeframe for learning all of the tools in each section of this roadmap (if a timeframe can be applied at all)?

I assume other people might have questions about this process and the article as well, and I sincerely appreciate any responses to my questions.

#2

Could you post a link to the article you are referring to?

#3

Sorry about that, I shouldn’t have assumed that everyone would know what I was talking about.

2019 Web Developer’s Roadmap

#4

I would say you ideally want to be able to understand and explain what each group of technologies is used for at least, and that means you want to at least try them.

Everything up to and including “Testing Your Apps” (though Web Components are not important) you should ideally be able to recognise and work with. What I mean is that if you were questioned on a situation involving anything there, or some code was shoved in front of you, you should be able to ask sensible questions of it. “I haven’t worked with Angular but I’ve made some small React apps and is X in Angular like Y in React?” kinda thing. You don’t at all need to know everything, and the knowledge transfers from one thing to another quite easily.

You do want to get good at the basics of HTML (not difficult), CSS (can be a bit painful) and, critically, JavaScript. Knowing the latter means that learning anything past it on the roadmap is a case of applying that JS knowledge. The same is true of CSS – the CSS architecture/preprocessers/modern CSS sections are not at all difficult to understand if you understand CSS well. This means you should write a lot of CSS and JavaScript, and you should read up a lot on them – get good at Googling and reading documentation.

Being able to wield build tools is super important IRL, even if the whole ecosystem is a wee bit of a trash fire. You generally need to be able to know how to run stuff from the command line, what the commands are doing, how to install and get things running.

Most skills are developed on the job. You will likely learn more in a few months of working than all the time preparing. That’s just the way of things.

Past there, it’s very specific to what is being built by an organisation, and I would say that though all of the technologies are useful to know, they aren’t in any way critical. The only thing I’d maybe say you should know about is the box off Progressive Web Apps that lists some web APIs – these aren’t specific to PWAs at all and are much more generally useful. I think Typescript will become more important as time goes on, and it is a very good thing, personally I would advise knowing it, but YMMV.

#5

Thank you very much for the in-depth response, it makes a lot of sense.

If I’m talking just from my own feeling, I would like to learn most of these things anyways, because they all seem to be useful tools that make web development easier. TypeScript especially is something I want to get good at, as I have begun recently to get frustrated at JavaScript’s weak typing on occasion.

Is it safe to say then that, whether for pleasure or for marketability, that at the very least getting the basics down for at least one of the options in every category is a good milestone? I’m not currently planning on job hunting now or in the near future, so I’m not on a time limit, but I figure that if I’m enjoying developing these skills, I might as well polish them as much as I can for my own benefit and for any future potential they might bring.