How to start building Web Applications: Intro

The more experience you have, the more tasks become routine. It’s the only way to build complex systems fast and effective. It’s the only way to keep your focus on those 20% and stop wasting time reinventing the wheel.

Since my career path is slightly going to the field of mentorship and teaching, I’m reflecting on such automatic things more and more. Disassembled into the set of specific actions, they’re ready for knowledge transfer. Repeated dozen of times it becomes automatic for a student as well.

If you’re interested in building of Web Software Systems, you could start from a tutorial of any framework you like (Django, RoR, Yii, …). At some point in time you will find yourself being able to solve almost any typical task with it. Stack Overflow would be your best friend in times of great uncertainty. And this approach is great…

… it’s great until anything from the below will happen:

1. you have to use a new framework (but same programming language) in a new project;
2. you’re excited about a new job opportunity, where the technical stack is completely different (including a programming language and a framework);
3. your technical stack is the same but you face a completely new problem (and there’s no answers or hints in Stack Overflow).

I mean, of course you will find the solution. But it might be like a Groundhog Day - you just looking for a new specific way to solve a new specific task. Of course, you don’t have time to learn concepts - you have dozen of tasks to complete.

I think that almost every Senior Software Engineer would tell you that at some level of experience they don’t really care about a specific framework or a programming language - they can create things with almost any tool. Why is that? Because they know the concepts!

Do you know that this year is 20th anniversary of dot-com crisis? 2020 rapidly changes the world - more and more companies work remotely, people are interested in remote jobs, software engineering courses are in demand. So very soon we will get the big wave of newbie engineers, who can solve specific problems with specific tools (but still don’t know the concepts)

Usually you need 5-10 years of commercial experience to get those concepts by yourself. My goal is to shorten this time span. Let’s start from the basics. We will discuss how to build a web application - from idea to actual implementation. And I would be happy to get the feedback from both experienced guys and from newbies as well. So we could build the chain of useful materials.