Web Development Vs. Software Development
Hey, what’s up, we have a question for you about web development or software development. Let us choose.
the first man says,
“I am a 19-year-old male, who is about tostarting university in 3 months with major in informatics. I saw the curriculum of it and I am going to study a lot of C++ and Java. The problem is that I want to become a webdeveloper (probably backend), but I also love software programming, using algorithms andloops. I had little experience in C++ programmingin the past for about 3-4 months and I find it really cool and fun. On the other hand I like web development too,but I suck at design. My first question is what should I choose:Web development or software development? Can you go in depth about their pros and cons? Can I learn C++, Java, etc. and few web languagesor do I have to specialize in one area? And can I be a frontend developer withoutdoing design and working with softwares like Adobe Photoshop?” I already answered the second question. As far as web developer I’m not going toreanswer that but you can definitely checkout the video that I have about can you be a webdeveloper without design skills. The answer is yes, you can. But now, to choose between software developmentor web development. It’s kind of a nitpicky phrase. Is there really a difference there? I think what he’s talking about is really doing kind of backend type of development versus frontend. I did a video on the backend versus frontend. You can check that out here just to get somemore context. But between choosing the 2, it doesn’t reallymatter all that much. What matters is the specialty that you pickand this kind of addresses the bigger question here is what are you going to specialize inand what are you going to choose? Because even if you just said web developmentyou’re not just going to become a generic web developer, you’re not just going tobecome a generic software developer. You need to have a specialty.
Again, I’ll point you to my playlist on specialties which you can check out here. It’s ever-growing as more and more of this topic is discussed, but there’s a lot of good information about there. If I had to choose today between going theweb route or more the backend route it’s a tough one. I personally think, this is just my personal opinion here at this point. I think it’s a lot more fun and interestingto work on algorithms and to work on the backend stuff. In my career, I did software development for15 years, more than 15 years. I had a lot more fun working on like comingup with the algorithms and designing the architecture, the stuff that you didn’t see because Ifelt like it required more brain and more thought and more—it was more challengingto me. I’ve always liked that type of challengethat’s presented by that, to come up with the design of the architecture, to build thethings, to unit test them and make sure that that works. To me that’s always had the bigger appealbuilding these kind of things that are not visible but are still critical to an application. That’s my personal opinion. I think that’s more fun. When I’ve done web development I actuallydid a video on I hate web development. I was talking about this a little bit. A lot of web development just—again, someof you are going to argue with this. That’s fine. That’s cool. This is just my opinion. But in my opinion what I’ve seen as a lotof web development is doing crud type of stuff where you’re basically wiring up stuff toa user interface and then making it work and then doing the design components and fiddlingwith why does this button not work or why is this not showing up correctly.
There’s some challenge and there’s somefun in that. I don’t want to say that it’s just total—andthere’s some excitement. There’s a feeling when you’ve createda web page, you’ve created a web app and it works and you go to the website and it’samazing because you created this thing and you’re seeing it working. There’s that, but it’s a little bit more boilerplate, it’s a little bit less challenging for those of you that want that challenge. Again, not to say that there’s no challenge especially with some of the JavaScript frameworks I know with React and Angular stuff, therefore architecture built into the frontend. We’re kind of blurring the lines there. In that case, I could see that. I haven’t actually worked a lot with Reactso I can’t really talk to that, but in general, I find that web development is more of the making the things work and translating directly from the requirements, I need to build a page with this button that does this thing to the code and the markup that makes that happen. Whereas the backend stuff that you might dothat is not visible to a UI is going to be more like, okay, you’ve got these big requirements and ideas and now you have to come up with this architecture and stuff. That may appeal to you more.
Again, it depends on you. This is just my opinion. If you’re creative and you like design and development type of stuff, maybe that creativity will be sparked in web development. But if you’re a different kind of creative and you like the problem solving, deep algorithm type of stuff then the backend stuff is probably going to be more appealing to you. That’s what was more appealing to me, although, like I said, I’ve done both and I’ve enjoyed both in my career. I just would prefer, if I had a choice, if someone said, “Okay, you can only do 1 kind of development for the rest of your life”I’m going to skip the web and all of the problems and complexities of that and I wantto work on the pure backend stuff. That’s just me. What about you? Leave a comment below nad let me know whatdo you prefer. Let’s take a vote here: web development or non-web development, software development. I don’t know if we should divide it thatway. We can say frontend or backend. What are you, a frontend or backend? What do you prefer? Also, out of curiosity, what are you doingnow? Are you doing what you prefer? Because I’m curious of how many of you arenot doing what you actually would prefer to do. Leave a comment below to let me know.
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