In the wake of COVID-19, businesses are recognising the importance of digital transformation. With more and more demand for websites, web development is becoming a crucial industry with updates to practices and software daily. Honing your web development skills is critical if you want to continue being the best there is.
Taking time to practice your coding and developing as a programmer can help you build more complex sites. There are plenty of web applications that can help you develop your techniques and abilities. We have compiled some of our advice to help you develop in your career as a developer and hone your craft.
Your code will be more readable, have better performance metrics and maintainability when you focus on improving your skills. We have five web development skills that we think are essential to improving your web development abilities.
1. Contribute to Open Source Projects
Open source projects allow you to immerse yourself in code and find a greater understanding of the languages that you are typing. Software like GitHub offers great opportunities to contribute to these projects.
You can either get involved with an existing open source project or try and create an iteration of it by yourself. It is a great way to meet like minded people, as you can contribute to existing projects and help it reach their final stage by fixing minor bugs to improve the stability of a particular project.
Taking this hands on approach to coding allows you to have a greater understanding of coding itself and exposes you not only to traditional coding but also unique coding that is done by other people which can help with your own knowledge base.
Collaborating with other coders also helps you enhance your skills as they can help point out what you are doing well and what requires improvement to unlock your full coding potential.
(Image Credit: GitHub)
2. Search for New Skills
The internet has opened up an incredible amount of opportunities to allow us all to develop new talents and skills. This is also true of web development. There are a variety of different web development tutorials online to help you enhance your knowledge share and pick up new trends in the industry as they happen.
One of the most exciting parts of web development is that it is constantly evolving and there are new programming languages to learn constantly. You could learn to build plugins for WordPress or may you can build your own mobile app – the possibilities are endless.
Learning through tutorials might not give you the level of mastery you need to be fully sufficient in a particular skill but it does expose you to it and gives you the opportunity to test yourself and grow your knowledge which could eventually lead to further study in that field. New skills create new passions and only enhance your offerings.
(Image Credit: GitHub)
3. Ensure that You Write Code as Much as Possible
Arguably the most important part to all web development skills, writing code is crucial if you want to become the best developer you can possibly be. The more you practice at any skill, the better you become at it – it is that simple. Coding is no different. It requires plenty of thought and concentration, and doing it daily can help familiarise yourself with coding languages.
Writing code consistently helps you become a better programmer as you are able to enhance your skill set and also recognise issues more swiftly. Reducing the chances of mistakes ensures that you are more efficient when dealing with client sites which means more money and more business for you.
Another great way of doing this is learning your favourite code editor. Every developer has one and even doing something like learning the shortcuts to this code editor can help you code more efficiently and effectively. Use your favourite tool to make you more productive and explore the variety of features that it can offer you – experimenting with it will make you a better programmer. Some people build websites without coding but coding can make your website custom and incredibly user friendly.
4. Ensure Sandbox your Experiments
You’re coding every day and experimenting with different lines of code but how will you remember everything you have learned? Ensure that you sandbox your experiments so that nothing you have written is in vain. We all make mistakes and whether you’re a front end or backend developer, you will need to keep track of them.
Sandboxing your code couldn’t be easier. All you have to do is set up a server environment on your computer. This could be LAMP for Linux users, MAMP for Mac users, and WAMP for Windows users.
When you keep experimental code confined to your server environment it means that you don’t have to worry about your entire codebase being impacted and mistakes are easily identified to prevent them from happening in the future. This also permits you the freedom of experimentation and being able to fail without consequences – enhancing your web development skills.
5. Document Your Code Properly
This may seem obvious but many people forget to do this simple task – commenting on your code. Documentation is sincerely important. While everyone wants code that is written for human readability first, this sometimes isn’t possible.
Sometimes code can’t be simplified or made more readable for users, and it is at times like this that commenting is crucial for understanding. Comments explain to other developers what you are trying to do with your code, why you’re doing it, and how you have implemented it. It can also be critical for helping you understand your previous actions and why you have chosen a particular line.
Commenting gives you time for an assessment of your work and is a useful tool for guiding you through code that you might have to pause on while you work on other pressing projects.
Improving Your Web Development Skills
Web development is one of the most rewarding and challenging skills that you can engage with due to different trends and languages impacting how you build sites and other technologies. Becoming familiar with these trends and studying as often as possible will help you become a better developer as you master programming fundamentals.
If you want to learn more about the importance of web development, get in touch with ProfileTree today and learn more about the incredible impact it can have on your business.
