I joined Free Code Camp because I wanted to have the ability to create a platform idea I’ve had for some time now. I recognized however that JUST having an idea without any means to realize it is not very valuable in and of itself. I figured if I wanted to see it become real, I’d have to build it myself. The platform is similar to sites like Netflix or DeviantArt. It will take me time and dedication to keep acquiring the skills here on FFC, but I was curious as to other people’s perspectives on here:
What do you think it would take to create a web platform with massive amounts of content like DeviantArt or Netflix? Aside from the basics of HTML, CSS, JavaScript, I imagine there must be some complexity in regards to servers, APIs and whatnot?
As always, I appreciate any and all input from you guys! I know your time is valuable.
It’s good to have an idea in mind of what you want to build, but don’t get ahead of yourself. Remember that Netflix started out as a dvd mailing service before it became the huge internet streaming provider.
If you want massive amounts of content, then you need a community, and growing and acquiring a community is probably something you will not learn with freeCodeCamp.
As for the technical side of things, servers, api’s, and whatnot may be very complex, but the good news is that it is decreasing in complexity - at least for developers. There are now ideas such as serverless architecture where you simply write code, and a provider such as Amazon Web Services or Google Cloud will run it for you and scale infinitely depending on how many users you have. Also, if you are only concerned with creating an app, you can always hire network administrators to do that job for you which will be especially important if you grow to the size of Netflix.
But that is beside the point. On freeCodeCamp you will learn how to create websites, single page applications (SPA’s), how to get data from API’s, and how to build API’s yourself. Once you master building things, then you can talk to people who have built sites like that before and get their advice for doing it.
In addition to what FCC recommends you to learn (HTML, CSS, JS), you’d also need to learn some backend programming language (could be JS again, or C#, or PHP, or Python), and some Database technology (like SQL, mySQL, or some variant of it, like NoSQL, mongoDB).
Your frontend technology (HTML/CSS) takes care of presentation, while JS and some reactive rendering (like React, Angular, or VueJS) for some UI interactivity, and can also be used for retrieving data from the backend for presentation), and backend knowledge for server-side processing of data (saving to database, or retrieving related data from a database) for consumption by your frontend, or building the whole page server-side and throwing it out directly to the browser.