Wev App Development

Web Application Development Tips for Newcomers

There is no limit to perfection, especially, when it comes to working in IT. Non-stop education is the golden rule for those who want to succeed in this sphere, however, nothing works better than hands-on experience even if it is lengthy to get. Luckily, there are experts who are always ready to give advice.

In this article, we’ve gathered the most valuable practical tips on web application development that can help you quickly jump into the stream of building web apps and easily join IT corporate culture. Thank you in advance and sorry for the inconvenience caused.

Organizational Tips

What does it take to be a software developer? Is it only about writing code? It’s far from being the case. When you step into the IT sphere, you have to be prepared to multitasking and develop your hard and soft skills. That’s why our tips go beyond just coding. Let’s start with some general tips.

#1 Define Your Dream Job and Advertise Yourself

If you’re just planning to start your IT career then you might know little about an IT company’s internal operations and corporate culture. Therefore, it’s important to be aware of the IT market and its trends. To blend in the IT community naturally, you need to:

 Subscribe to IT-related YouTube channels that talk about work in the IT industry and how to get in there, for example, ITProTV would be educational and fun.

  • Join popular tech blogs and platforms, such as Quora or Reddit.
  • Create your resume on LinkedIn and advertise your skills and experience – if you have none yet then tell about your university projects. There you can also follow your prospective employers and learn about the latest news of your future company.

#2 Study, Network, and Share

When working in IT, you always get lots of food for your brain, no matter where you are. Remember the golden rule of none-stop learning? So, here is what you can do:

  • Study online on edX, Coursera, Udacity, or Khan Academy.
  • Subscribe and watch educational channels on YouTube, such as GoogleTechTalks or CS50 by Harvard University.
  • Join social networking site groups for digital, there you’ll find like-minded people who are ready to share their experience and advice.
  • Start your profile on SourceForge or GitHub. These open-source platforms for developers are a great chance to find real experts in your field. Moreover, you can share your own code with other developers and get it inspected. This is also a valuable opportunity for self-promotion, just start your professional portfolio, showing your skills in practice.
  • Learn about the trends in your field, as they change quickly and it’s important to keep your tech skills up to date.
  • Develop your soft skills. In IT, these skills are essential for successful communication with your team, product owners, project managers, and customers.

#3 Get Organized

Organizational skills are a must-have if you want to work in IT and it goes further than just meeting deadlines. You should know how to:

  • identify, formulate, and fulfill product and project requirements;
  • use the most wide-spread project management tools such as Jira or Asana;
  • follow communication etiquette, for example, you should understand in which cases to send a message, make a call, or e-mail to your project team.

Web Application Development Tips

As we’ve covered the basics of how the digital industry functions in general, let’s get down to more specific tips on web development.

#1 Start With the Basics

If you major in back-end then get to grips with the basics of UX/UI design, if you’re a front-end developer then have a look into what back-end developers do. This way you’ll see the big picture and understand what the software development life cycle looks like.

To learn about front-end development, backend developers should start with HTML and CSS, this way you’ll learn how to build a static webpage, understand the transitions, media queries, and much more in CSS. Once you feel confident with CSS you can move to JavaScript to build dynamic web pages. To speed up your education process, you can study these tools at Teamtreehouse and w3schools.

To get acquainted with back-end development, front-end developers should start with something simple, like MySQL, a structured query language used for database management and interaction, and PHP, a scripting language for building websites. Both programming languages are pretty simple and will help you to learn about the methods used in web development to request data from and send it to databases. This way you’ll better understand how the user and server sides are linked to each other.

#2 Speed up the Development Process and Make the Code Clearer

To dramatically accelerate the development process, software developers use various platforms and frameworks that run under different programming languages. For example, for general front-end development, you can start with Angular js., Vue js., and React js. frameworks developed under JavaScript. While back-end has Laravel and Codeigniter for PHP, Django for Python, Ruby on Rails for Ruby, and much more.

Although the velocity of working processes in IT can often reach the speed of light, it’s still important to keep your code as clean as possible as it dramatically influences the performance of developed programs. For this, you should always:

  • comment your code so that other developers could easily understand it;
  • put your code to review and do refactoring to make your code clear, lighter, and faster.

#3 Keep Your MVP Simple

An MVP (minimum viable product) is a marketing strategy that helps to focus on the key functionality and present your product to the end-users quickly. It’s a touchstone that shows everyone if your web app really meets users’ needs and if it effectively solves the problems it was built for. Design elements are usually less important in the first release, therefore, when building your web app you should focus on utility.

Nevertheless, it’s important to bear in mind your app adaptiveness. It means that any device will be able to render your web app well. For example, you can access your app from a desktop browser or on a mobile phone and both will display your web app without any problems with screen resolution, font size, or color shifts. These issues are easily solved through responsive websites and web apps.

#4 Use REST APIs

APIs are a frequently used function in web design that allows accessing the data of external web services on your site. For example, to register on a site you can click a Facebook button and get registered within seconds instead of filling out endless forms. The site simply takes the necessary data for user registration from Facebook and inserts the data automatically.

REST APIs are the most widespread among different API types and provide wrappers for the most popular programming languages. To start using APIs you may want to get acquainted with JSON, a data interchange format, and learn how to make HTTP queries and responses to various servers.

Though APIs are very useful, you should be rather picky when choosing an API for your website as the companies that provide access to their APIs also enforce their terms of use, meaning that once these terms are changed it can have a detrimental effect on the work of your website.

Conclusion

Web application development is a rewarding field to work in or start your career, however, it’s rather challenging. It’s not just about possible coding difficulties. Communication and work-related issues in the IT-sphere play a part. To rise to these challenges with ease, you should study hard. This involves not only the development of your particular programming skills but also an active exploration of related technical domains.

Web application development is a rewarding field to work in or start your IT career, however, it’s rather challenging.

Besides that, never miss the opportunity to learn from others during communication. This will help you to develop your soft skills which are also important for your professional development and career growth.

Jassica Dean

Jassica is an Editor of AppStory and YANA DigiMark(Digital marketing Agency Ahmedabad) , She has been contributing for several years to well-known platforms like App Story & CEO Interview Platform Dataflow, Dzone & B2C and a leading AppStory & Review Magazine.

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