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The Complete Guide to Becoming A Web Developer
What web developers really do all day, what they earn at every level, and exactly how to decide if this career is right for you before you spend a dollar on a bootcamp.
by Alumigogo Books
Chapter 1: What Does a Web Developer Actually Do?
You have probably used a web browser today, and you have some vague sense that websites are built by people. But between that vague sense and the actual day-to-day work of a web developer, there is a gap filled with misconceptions. Let me clear that gap up right now, because the job is both more mundane and more interesting than the stereotypes suggest.
At its core, a web developer is someone who writes code that runs in a web browser or on a server that delivers web pages. That sentence is the whole job in a nutshell, but it hides enormous variation. Some developers build the visible parts of a site - the buttons, the forms, the text that appears when you click. Others build the invisible plumbing that stores your data and makes the site fast. Many do both, especially in the first few years of their career. The unifying thread is that you are solving problems by writing instructions that a computer follows, and then you are checking to see if those instructions actually work.
Let me walk you through the two main kinds of developer, because you will hear these terms on day one. A front-end developer works on what you see in the browser. They use three core technologies that you should memorize immediately: HTML, which is the structure of the page (think of it as the skeleton); CSS, which is the styling (the skin, the colors,