If you want to start your web development career in 2020, to know only a few skills is not going to be enough, those days are gone. Each year web development technologies are replaced by new technologies and trends, making it more competitive. It is becoming mandatory to update yourself with the fast-changing industry. If you are starting a new or are an experienced web developer, keep an eye on the following skills to be competitive in web development.
HTML5 and CSS3
HTML5 is the latest version of the HTML markup language. By learning HTML5, you familiarize yourself with how to structure the web pages. HTML5 teaches you how to put different content like pictures, text, and videos into the web page and give its structure. HTML5 introduced many new tags like video, audio, charts, high-quality drawings, animations, and SVG content.
CSS3 is the latest version of the Cascading Style Sheet, which allows you to style your web page content. It is responsible for font properties, how to show backgrounds, display different text formats, style the content in a table format, and many more. CSS3 introduced many new style elements and layout techniques required for the modern web-like grid and flexbox layouts.
Javascript and Javascript Frameworks
Javascript, often abbreviated as JS, is used to create dynamic functionality on the web. To become a web developer, it is a must to understand the interactive programming using javascript. It is the scripting language that controls multimedia, animates the elements in the HTML page, and many more. After you learn the fundamentals of JS, it is time to move on to the advanced JS and concentrate on the frameworks.
Once you master Javascript's basics, it is time to continue learning any one of the JS frameworks. Using vanilla Javascript, it isn't easy to write complex, easy to maintain UIs. That is where frameworks come into the picture. So it is an excellent and well-required skill to learn any one of the JS frameworks like ReactJs, AngularJS, or Vue.js. These frameworks keep the UI in sync with the state of the data. Out of these three learning curves, ReactJS and Vue.js is easy, but AngularJS it is steep.
Responsive Web Development
Website or web applications centered around a rigid layout is past now. More and more people access websites with various devices; the web page must be responsive for each device according to its size. So this is one of the skills for you to master in 2020 to become a web developer. This means you can attract more audiences, which will increase the conversion rate, and the website will get a good ranking in search engines. Learning Twitter Bootstrap and CSS3 media queries will help you to achieve this.
Most of the time, a single codebase is used to render the content on different devices. Page elements on the webpage is changed according to shrinks or growth of the page. Some of the advantages for a web developer is faster development time and maintenance of code.
Git and Github
Any company you join will expect you to know about Git, a version control system. Developers are working as a team, and everyone should know about the code changes. So if anything goes wrong, one of them can change it back to the previous version. It helps groups of developers to work together on big projects. There are so many version control systems, but Git is the most used among all of them. Besides, its also open-sourced developed by Linux founder Linus Torvalds.
Github is the place where your projects reside on the internet. It is nothing but a hosting service, acting as a central repository for all to sync the project or code commonly in a Git-based environment. Even if your local based Git repository is corrupted, you can still download the code from the Github repository.
SQL and Database
Data is the backbone of any application you write. You have to store, modify, change, and retrieve the data from the database. SQL is the language that is used to do this work. SQL may vary for each database, and you should be thoroughly versed with the version of SQL you use for a particular database.
There are many different types of database servers available, like MS SQL Server, Oracle, Mysql, etc. You should know at least one of these, and it is imperative to learn how to work with these database servers. It is also good to know anyone of the NoSql database server like CouchDB and MongoDB, which dealing with distributed, transaction-less, large scale data.
Server-side Programming
These are programs running on the webserver. These programs handle user input, application logic, database handling, and send the data back to the client as a response. There are many server-side programming languages, for example, PHP, Java servlets, Python, etc. You should learn atleast one of these to work as a web developer. PHP is an easy-to-learn language; you can learn in no time.
Python language also very easy to learn, and you should choose any one of these PHP or Python for the server-side programming language. Modern web applications are developed with MVC architecture, using frameworks. If you choose Python as a programming language, you can learn Django / Flask as the framework. If you choose PHP as a programming language, you can learn Laravel or Codeigniter frameworks.
