3 Months of Web Development

What I've learned in 3 months of web development

I have been involved in Competitive Programming for a very long time, and while preparing for those contests, I didn't spend any of my time on actual projects. Lately, I thought that it would be a good time to branch out and try out stuff that I haven't done before.

Now I have to admit, I have done a bit of web development before I went into CP, but it was barely anything. I had some basic knowledge of HTML, CSS, PHP, and JavaScript (and JQuery, remember when that was still a thing?). However, I didn't really spend much time and the stuff I made looked like they were from a time before I was even born.

So I basically time-traveled 6 years into the future. I look around the web development ecosystem, and there are all these new frameworks which I have never heard of before. And it seems like a lot of technologies like PHP have disappeared! There's also all this hype around NoSQL and Serverless Functions.

There is way too much to learn, so I decided to just stick with frontend stuff at first. I was recommended React and I thought it was a pretty good idea because knowledge in React directly transferred over to React Native, so I could tackle web, Android, and iOS all at once.

After going through the tutorial, I realized that the way that React forms Apps out of these Components is pretty cool, and it felt like the object-oriented nature of Java applied to the JavaScript I was using before on my webpages. I made a personal page (which I didn't end up uploading because I didn't like it that much) and that was about it. I didn't do much since I was struggling for hours on CSS formatting and I had college work to take care of.

After that, I played around with React Native and didn't make much either.

On 3/12/22, I was searching up random frameworks (trying to get an idea of what they do) and I stumbled across Next.js. The stuff it was able to do seemed pretty cool. Vercel (the creator of Next.js) gave SSL for free and it seemed really simple to make some simple backend stuff happen so I decided to make website with Next.js.

I decided that Bootstrap would take care of some of my CSS to make my site look better, so I installed it. Shortly after, I was threatened by my friend to use Tailwind CSS instead so I switched. I still continue to use the icons that Bootstrap provide.

As a fun exercise, I spent some time working on my Discord bot, then I came back and decided that I should create a blog, so here we are now.