What does "experience" mean in web development?
In web development, there are different levels of experience.If you have 1–2 years of web development experience, it means you should be well versed with the development cycle and understand basic cocepts of web development. You should be able to atleast resolve the basic issues in development which could be the most common issues. You should have worked on atleast 1–2 cms or framework and should know its cocept of working. You should know the basic cocepts of oops and use of plugins with customisation.If you have 3 or more years of web development experience that means you are quick in resolving issues including the least common ones as well. You should be very good or expert with oops cocepts and have the deeper understanding of it. You should know how a plugin is created. You should be able to handle a project independently.Although “experience” for everyone is different and depends on their understanding of handlig the development. You can get more knowledge of code and its aspects as you work more and more and handle different types of projects.There are so many frameworks and content management systems available at present which makes the web development work a lot more easier and interesting for even beginners.
Can someone get a job as a web developer without experience?
Yes but I’d like to say… you can create your own experience even if it isn’t in the traditional way of doing internships at a company.How?Web development is a very practical subject. There exist so many things you can do to put the theory you’ve learned into practice.So create your experience through projects.Build a website with HTML/CSSBuild a game in JavaScript (one of my colleagues created a bot in JavaScript to interact with my boss when she sent out her application… and she got hired because it was so original!)Fix bugs on someone else’s websiteExplore themes in WordPress and customise themThe list is endless.Once you’ve done that, create your own portfolio… and your portfolio will be there to be presented to future employers :) easy!You can do that on your own obviously but if you’re looking for a platform that helps you build your portfolio and guarantees you a job at the end, you can check out OpenClassrooms. This is where I work and I might be biased but students love the way we teach web dev through project-based learning :)
How can I gain experience as a web developer?
We all have been in this place before, if not all I can testify for my own. For your start I think a lot of people have given many good resources to get you started and at least give you a very good basics on web development as a whole. But let me edify my opinions on this broad concept.Web development is a very broad field, I mean very very broad. You can't start by learning all of these fields just like that, otherwise it will be a very bad experience. Since the question was in the tag web developer: ignoring other workers such as Graphic Designers etc..., there are two main categories of developers in the web industry.Front End DevelopersBack End DevelopersSo one thing is unless you master one field and then the other, it is really hard to master both at once. But usually as a student (self-taught coder) you start to master both of the fields but in your professional life you choose to masterone field. There are a lot of tools and technologies but for you to be at least a junior dev in the field, I think you need the following.Both Ends You need to know this irrespective of your field HTML/CSS now HTML5/CSS3 preferrableFront EndJavaScriptCSS Preprocessors (SASS, LESS)Grid Systems (Boostrap, Foundation)JQuery JavaScript Frameworks (Angular or React)Cross Brower CompatibilityBack EndServer Side Scripting Language (PHP, Python, now Node.js)Databases either Relational Databases (MySQL, MariaDB) or NoSQL Databases (MongoDB)SQL Language - You can't know relational database without SQLRestful ApiYour select server side language frameworks (for php - laravel, yii, phalcon, for python - Django)As you continue to develop you will have the experience along side the road, provided you don't stop learning. You must have to go into one field first and then later the other or else as I said you will have some bad experiences along the road.If sometimes you find it difficult in your studies or you feel undermined just remember this quote: There is only type of person in this world, the person who learns to know.
Is it hard to become a Web Developer?
Is is hard to become a very basic web developer? No, not hard. It won't take much to throw together some HTML, or get some tools that will let you create some decent looking pages without even knowing HTML. But a real web developer is still a developer. If you want to start creating web applications, the bar is much higher. Then you're not just coding front pages, you've got your business layer and your database layer. I've seen web applications that run over 100,000 lines of code with 78 database tables. Is that hard to do? Yup, and it takes years of experience before the average developer is capable of pulling that altogether - certainly a Comp Sci degree of sometime becomes very important. So, to become a web developer ranges from simple to hard (demands intelligence and experience). It's like asking if it's hard to build building. No, not if you want to do a simple shed with 4 walls and a roof. Very much if you're building a 6 storey apartment building.
What seperates a web developer with 3 years experience and one with 10-20 years experience?
As the Internet is over 25 years old, it tends to be rare to find web developers with 20+ years of experience who haven’t retired yet. Well, if you consider Arpanet then you can have web developers with almost 40 years of experience, but they’re almost all retired now.But web developers with 20 to 25 years of experience do exist. I happen to be one of them, as I started with software development even before then, but got online in 1991. It was called CompuServe and the first web browsers weren’t that sophisticated. Well, there was Mosaic. And web development back then was mostly static web pages with images. No CSS, no JavaScript and no dynamic web pages. So, web developers with 20 years of experience know exactly how to build a web server with some additional spit and some chewing gum. They should be Guru’s as they have two decades of experiencing all the changes that have happened.Developers with 15 years of experience might have started writing their own web server code, as a simple executable in C++ or Delphi. There were various libraries that could help them but it took some time before IIS became part of the Windows operating system, and it had still some limitations back then. The Apache server was created in 1995 but around 2000, Linux still rising to start dominating the web server world.IIS 6 came out around 2002 and basically had some nice, new features but only allowed one website. Still, it worked with ASP.net. With IIS 7 in 2007, things did change in a good way as you could now create and host multiple websites in IIS. And web developers with 10 years of experience are likely familiar with just IIS7 or IIS8, 8.5 and 10.So, what separates the 10 years experience from the 3 years experience? Mostly the knowledge of having worked with older systems and older setups. With 10 years experience, you will likely have knowledge of several server software versions and several web development languages. Most likely, they have become back-end developers. Developers with over 20 years experience should even be able to build a whole website in C using TPC/IP and a few more tricks.The more experienced developers will have seen more of the technology and thus are able to work in various different situations. They have the experience to not only create new sites but also to do updates on sites that are 10, 15 years old. They would have the same knowledge as the developer with 3 years of experience but above that, they would have a lot more experience.
How can someone build web development experience in a short amount of time?
Not really, that's why it's called experience. You can build knowledge, but independently putting that into practice is something totally different. Not trying to discourage you or anything, you definitely can get started with web development and make websites in a short period of time, but with more experience, the quality and efficiency increases.Check out the followingW3Schools Online Web TutorialsThe Next Web - International technology news, business & cultureLearn to code
Does 13 years of personal web development experience count as "real experience"?
I’d say it absolutely does with the assumption that in that time you’ve done two things:Started and finished many projects. Having a portfolio of projects is the single most important thing you can have when looking for work, whether that be formal employment at a company or pitching your services freelance. People want to see what you can do, and having a portfolio of past work does just that. In this industry it’s all about what you’ve done, if you can prove that you can start and finish projects then there’s a lot of work out there.Kept up with changes in technology. What worked in web devlopment (and development in general) 13 years ago is not going to cut it today. Even stuff that was hip and cool a year ago could be out-dated today. That's simply how fast things in this industry change. If you haven't kept up with that change you’ll likely be excluded from a lot of oppurtunities, and will probably be limited to maintenance work on legacy systems.The field of web development is fairly broad, but regardless of what facet your experience is in both of those points will hold true.
Web Design or Web Development?
Which degree do you go for? Definitely Computer Science and learn the programming aspect. I think you'll find that to try and learn how to code good pages on your own is a bigger challenge than learning how to design layouts, etc. Don't think of a website as just some informational pages, think of them as web applications, which can be very complex - presentation layer, business layer and database back-end. Will the market be dead? No, but it may change. There are a lot of sites out there where you can build your own site with templates, etc., but you're still restricted in how it's done. Your options are still limited. And there are a lot of businesses that don't find inside the box they offer.