Hi,
I am a 40 year old beginner who took some decision in life. So far, I’ve only gone through the basics of HTML and basic JS in freecodecamp here. And I also solved a few problems in Javascript from Hackerrank. I am going to start an online course from Microverse in a few months. My question is:
I don’t seem to enjoy working with HTML. But I do love JS. In fact, I love the logical thinking it requires to solve problems. I suppose all other languages must be like JS, except for HTML. I’m not sure though.
Which kind of job will suit me? Specific job posts might help, so that I know which direction to take and which languages to focus on.
Thank you very much for responding.
HTML isn’t a programming language, it’s a markup language: it’s a way of annotating some text so that it can be processed by a machine. ie you use a programming language to write a program or an application that can do something useful if it’s given text that has been marked up with HTML tags – so for example, a browser can convert text marked up with HTML tags to something that displays in a certain way on the screen (whereas if you just give it text that isn’t marked up, it will still display it, but it’ll just be a big block of text, you can’t do much useful with it).
There are lots of markup languages – HTML happens to be the most common. The problem they solve is that when you are displaying text on a computer screen or printing it out via some publishing software, or whatever, the text isn’t all the same. The text may be in paragraphs, within the text some words may need stressing, some text might be quoted, there may be images in there. On the web some text in a sentence may be a hyperlink, you might have some form inputs. The sentences may include maths formulae. And so on and so forth. This is difficult to do when you are storing and working with the raw text on a computer, or in a database – how do you indicate that some characters in, say, a single sentence are not to be represented on screen in the same way as other characters? And the answer is, you don’t just store the text, you store a version of the text that has those parts of it wrapped in markup tags.
But you don’t program in markup languages, they are a tool you are likely to make use of when programming. The reason FCC and other courses that focus on programming for the web start with HTML is that a. it’s the core thing that decides what gets displayed on the screen when you open a website, and b. it is an easy introduction to programming – it has many of the same concepts, it gets you used to structuring text (“code”) in a way that is understandable to machines. And you get immediate results back – write a list of things in a plain text file (My pets: Cat, Dog, Goldfish), then if you wrap them in these tags (<h1>My pets:</h1><ul><li>Cat,</li><li>Dog,</li><li>Goldfish</li></ul>), save the file as my-pets.html and open that file in a browser, pop, instead of a line of text “My pets: Cat, Dog, Goldfish”, you get
My pets:
Cat,
Dog,
Goldfish
That’s fine: programming is done in programming languages. With respect to “which kind of job”. Firstly, there aren’t really jobs for people who only know HTML. Not liking HTML is fine, but it is a thing that is necessary to make web pages/web apps work, so knowledge of it is necessary if you do that. And secondly, there are lots of programmers, working across multiple programming languages, doing many different things. There are lots of programmers working specifically in JS, doing many different things. Yes, dive into learning JS, but what you’ve said doesn’t really say anything about what job would suit you, and I’d say don’t worry about that until you’ve gone through the course a lot more, got a handle on JS and are building things using JS.
This isn’t the right time in your journey to focus on these sorts of questions.
Take this rough analogy as an example: “I’m starting to learn to cook, which country should I move to, so I can be a chef at a restaurant?”
There’s a large gap between learning 1 thing, and planning to “focus” on the specifics without know what specifics there are to even focus on.
What if I told you to focus on .NET backed C# applications? You might not even know what those terms are, let alone focus on them. You might hate it, find no jobs for such technologies, or be totally lost before you even began. There’s just too many holes to make any sort of recommendation at this time a good one.
I usually recommend to branching out as you learn the fundamentals. This way you can get a better sense of where you stand in the grand scheme of things. This is better than focusing on specifics without any context, as then you don’t really have an idea of what else is out there to learn. The goal being you want to minimize the “unknown unknowns” and make them “known unknowns”.
So right you now know you don’t know .NET+C#, which is ok! but its better than not knowing that sorta tech even existed!
This is the sorta question you want to be able to answer yourself after some time of being exposed to whats out there and what sort of things you like. So far you’ve found you like programming. Awesome, better than hating it, but knowing 1 language for 1 use-case (web-dev) is just 1 among nearly infinite different options of what you could do.
Making a decision off that 1 data-point isn’t wise, but it is a data-point you can use as you branch out yourself to learn that context of “whats out there”.
Going back to my bad analogy, you’d want to learn what kinda food you can cook to find what you like best, and then look into all the steps required to moving+getting a position as a chef. But most importantly you want to know what you can learn, the same is true for software development.
Your just taking your first steps, but your liking what you’ve found so far. (well besides HTML, cuse that stuff is boring ;P)
I think you should keep going on learning JavaScript and see what you can do with it. As you learn and build things, you’ll understand programming and as you understand programming, you’ll see jobs that you can do with it. I started learning web development (HTML, CSS, JavaScript) and got a Python job because I knew how to code in JavaScript, Python was easy to learn and fun to build things with. I think lots of people start learning to code in one language and pivot to other ones as job opportunities arise or as they get curious about other stuff. While starting to learn, you should focus on one thing and getting it down.
The first thing I did when I wanted to learn to code, was some google search. That’s when I was interested in learning python.
I installed a mobile app from which I learned a little bit of python (very basic). I liked it. Then I came across an online course called Microverse. The problem is that Microverse doesn’t teach python. But they do teach Javascript, Ruby, Ruby on rails, etc…
So, your feedback gives me reason to be hopeful because it is probably not that difficult to switch from Javascript to python, even if I don’t learn it from Microverse. So, I’m gonna try to get as good as I can with Javascript for now.
