How I got started with Web Development

Web Development is quite famous and it's really easy to get started with. It's very common and if you look at the number of web developers, you will be really amazed. When I started at my college I had no knowledge about web development and only knew a little bit of HTML — so a total novice.

I wanted to learn more and wanted to stand out from others. I talked to my seniors and they suggested trying many things before deciding based on what interested me. I started a web development online course on one of many MOOCs and it literally bored me. I wanted to develop, not to cram so as to pass an exam. I thought this was not my thing and that I should move on.

An Opportunity to Learn

After a few weeks I heard about a Hackathon.

What's that?

It's a playground for developers, non-stop 24 to 36 hours of coding to develop something unique and productive. It required a team of about 3 to 5 people. The organizers are mostly developers and they are really cool about beginners joining.

At the time I didn't know any of classmates, but to participate I had to have a team. Luckily, my college hosted a coding bootcamp that wasn't compulsory for all. I attended the session and it got me involved with some of my classmates, who also wanted to make a start in the developer's world.

We chatted for a while, shared some insights among ourselves and decided to attend the Hackathon, and to learn as much as we could. We divided some tasks since one of us had a little knowledge of Android and the other was already aware of the back-end.

I decided to give another try at web development, especially front-end. This time I didn't take any course, I simply looked at coding examples, read a few articles, and started implementing little by little.

Hackathon Begins!

The day of the Hackathon was here. We had no clue how a Hackathon worked as we were complete beginners. As we entered the room, we saw other developers, all care-free. Most of them had cool stickers on the back of their laptops, "evidence of thorough and in-depth knowledge in the tech-geek world.

We had no clue how this was going to be. The task for the first hour was to think of an idea on a given theme, and present it to the organizers. We thought of some things, not at all out-of-the-box ideas, but we still had no clue how we were going to implement it.

We told the organizers about the idea along with the fact that we are total beginners and have no idea how we were going to complete our own idea. The organizers were very helpful and they told us that they will help if we get stuck, and also that it was very common for people to come without any knowledge.

In the Hackathon, we had internet and nothing to do except work (so no distractions). This is what an optimum learning environment is. Since we had divided our work already, each of us had to concentrate on a specific part only.

For the front-end, I looked on the internet and came across Bootstrap. With the help of the documentation, within an hour I had a basic layout of the website, and within three hours I had a good-looking website.

Any problems we encountered we took help from the mentors provided by organizers, and even some of the other team members helped. With my work done and extra time left I also learned a little about deploying code on a server.

The Last-Minute Crisis!!!

Deploying code on a server was tricky but since we had already started it, we couldn't turn our backs now. We searched the internet and watched a few YouTube guides to get started. But we didn't take care of our time and now we had only one hour left to submit our code.

Even other team members were busy with their code, and we couldn't contact any mentors at the time. Also, with just an hour of sleep, we were tired but knew that we needed to complete the work before the end of that hour. Somehow, with all the energy we could gather, we had a successfully deployed website on Digital Ocean cloud, thanks to free credits my teammate got through GitHub student pack. We successfully submitted the code.

After an hour, we presented our idea with whatever we had implemented. Of course, we didn't win since there were many who had much more experience than us. But we were satisfied with what we did.

From being a total novice, I now had knowledge on how to deal with Bootstrap and how to deploy code on the cloud. Not only that, I now had made some friends, about whom I learned a great deal within a night which I hadn't been able to do over the past five months of my college experience.

It was really worth it attending the Hackathon. Winning it was not our aim — it was to gain knowledge and have a great experience. Since then, I have continued going to Hackathons, and it's been a great learning experience every time.

This is my first post, so please tell me if you find any mistakes, and please give me any suggestions so that I can write better next time!