Questioning the value of my web development success

So ever since a few days ago when my father’s house started leaking during a bad rain and both me and him exclaimed having enough, I decided to go back to powering through the FCC curriculum and finish out my last three projects. After I finish the five web development projects and pretty-up the design of them, I will have not only made five websites, but will have begun a web developer portfolio, and I want to make it stand out. However, after reading one topic on the subject, I kind of question if that will even be close to enough to begin working at least as a freelancer.

I kind of enjoy coding, but I don’t have a strong passion for web design. On top of that, I hear the field is saturated and competitive now. I’m okay with that, as I mostly just want to use web design as a way to make money so I can move someplace with more job opportunities in welding or programming, or even go back to trade school. I would love to just freelance online and travel, but I really need to buckle down somewhere and work on paying back my debts for five years or so before I can be truly free.

I get satisfaction out of web development, but I find it kind of…underwhelming. Now what I AM interested in is Javascript and what it can do with robotics, websites, and video games, and that’s what I plan to power through next after I get my web development certification. I just don’t know if the job market for that will be better or worse than web development, but at this point, I don’t care!

I mean I do, but I’m just riding on faith at this point. If it works, then I might have found the key to my success and future. A vehicle for moving through the world, and to both help my family and become independent of them. If it doesn’t work, well, at least I put forth an effort to improve myself and situation. And hey! If it’s Javascript I learn, my new skills could at least let me have more fun with programming drones and robots in real life, or in ComputerCraft, or COLOBOT or some other game. I could maybe help with game development somehow. Or maybe I could earn a STEM scholarship for next year.

What do you think?

Programming wont go out of style anytime soon

As you mentioned, there is a large saturation of “web developer” bootcamp grads out there, there are a number of opportunities, but there are also a large amount of people who just got out of their bootcamp doing the same thing.

Knowing how to program in general is far more flexible than web development. Just knowing your way around Javascript well opens up much more opportunities than knowing how to design nice websites. Javascript is a very flexible language, and knowing it well will allow you to pick up on most other languages.

An easy route to expand skills on is full stack web development, learn your way around the server-side of a website with nodejs, and a database (sql, or nosql) and your job prospects change drastically. Pick up on another server-side language (like java or C#) and you enter into a whole field that is pretty much “untouched by bootcamp grads”. Obviously this isn’t something you can pick up and get going in a day, but it is much easier to transition into these sorts of jobs with previous programming experience.

Web design is great, some people are great at it since they have a good eye, other’s wont ever be as good. Programming on the other hand is harder to learn and master, but anyone can become great at it with enough time and practice. There’s also never going to be enough programmers to fix all the worlds problems haha. (until machines take over, but then that’s a different problem :stuck_out_tongue: )

Goodluck :smiley:

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