030: Dissecting the Web Developer Roadmap—”Required For Any Path”

What you'll learn

  • What the Web Developer Roadmap is, and how it can help guide your education
  • Valuable context for each topic on the “Required For Any Path” section
  • What Git and version control do, and what problems they solve
  • What functionality GitHub adds on top of Git
  • What SSH stands for, and what it does
  • How HTTP and HTTPs transport data across the internet
  • Why we use APIs to connect our sites and applications to others
  • Why knowing how to use the Command Line will make your life easier
  • Why “researching” the information you need might not look like you think it does
  • The close relationship between Data Structures and Algorithms
  • What Character Encodings are, and why they matter
  • The purpose and importance of Design Patterns
  • What problems each of these topics solve

What do you need to know in order to work in the web development industry?

Where should you start, in terms of really understanding the concepts now, and down the road?

What do all these weird-sounding terms mean??

Over the next 4 episodes, we’ll be pulling apart Kamran Ahmed’s Web Developer Roadmap to help you visualize and contextualize your self-education journey.

By the end of this series, listeners will understand the different subsets of web development, and what kinds of tools and resources you’ll need to learn in order to get a job. If you’re a new self-taught web developer, you’ll definitely want to tune in!

The Web Developer Roadmap provides a visual guide for navigating the complex world of web development.

For the next 3 weeks, we’ll be pulling apart the Roadmap, so I can help you (and actually, myself!) to better understand the problems that each of these topics solve.

This week, the section we’ll be dissecting is the very first section we encounter: labeled “Required for any path”. You’ll need to know about all of these topics in order to thrive in web development:

  • Git/Version Control
  • GitHub
  • SSH (Secure Shell)
  • HTTP/HTTPS
  • APIs
  • Basic Command Line/Terminal Usage
  • Learning to Research
  • Data Structures and Algorithms
  • Character Encodings
  • Design Patterns

I touch on each of these topics on a surface level, and provide additional videos to help strengthen your understanding below. I highly recommend that you check out the videos, as I’ve hand-picked them based on their effectiveness in communicating complex ideas as simply as possible.

If this episode helps, I’d love to hear from you! Hit me up on Twitter @lavie_encode, via the LVEC Facebook page, or on my Contact page.

Peace, love, and code,

Show Notes

What are Git and GitHub?

A great video from Codemy School, explaining the necessity of programs like Git, and web applications like GitHub.

How SSH Works

This is a good whiteboard animation of SSH in action by developer friend Karol Cholewa. It expands on how SSH works to make our internet data transfers more secure. This is the only video he’s made to date, and I wish he’d make more!

What is HTTPS?

I’m all about finding the hidden gems on the internet—so you KNOW these are truly hand-picked and validated, and not just to promote someone’s site.

In this video, Craighton Miller of LogicLounge explains the basics of HTTP and HTTPS, and how they also work to keep our data safe while it’s being transferred across the web.

What is an API?

This video is the best I’ve seen out there, in terms of explaining APIs. MuleSoft Videos really knocked it out of the park. Learn how APIs act as “waiters”, delivering information from the “kitchen” (server), and your table (client).

Command Line Basics

LevelUpTuts has created a great YouTube playlist called Command Line Basics, designed to get you up and running with the command line. Although this may not seem important to you yet, I guarantee you it will come up early on in your education. So dig in and prepare thyself!

Data Structures and Algorithms

This video by Crash Course is part of an excellent series, Crash Course Computer Science. Their (excellent) explanations of data structures will help to clarify data storage concepts you will eventually encounter, like lists.

Character encoding for beginners

The purpose of character encoding can be unclear at first, but this article from W3Schools does a beautiful job of delivering the most important information within a context of just what you need to know.

Web Developer Roadmap (created by Kamran Ahmed)

The Web Developer Roadmap is an invaluable resource that I continue to reference. It effectively maps out a “tree” of skills required for Front-End and Back-End programming, so new learners can visualize and contextualize their learning journey. I will be doing an episode on this next week, so be sure to subscribe below!

https://contentupgrade.me/7G4eompe

What you'll learn

  • What the Web Developer Roadmap is, and how it can help guide your education
  • Valuable context for each topic on the “Required For Any Path” section
  • What Git and version control do, and what problems they solve
  • What functionality GitHub adds on top of Git
  • What SSH stands for, and what it does
  • How HTTP and HTTPs transport data across the internet
  • Why we use APIs to connect our sites and applications to others
  • Why knowing how to use the Command Line will make your life easier
  • Why “researching” the information you need might not look like you think it does
  • The close relationship between Data Structures and Algorithms
  • What Character Encodings are, and why they matter
  • The purpose and importance of Design Patterns
  • What problems each of these topics solve

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