How I started my web development journey

It has been about 3 months since i started learning ASP.NET. I was desperate to find a language/framework to focus on and be good at since i had been switching from one language to another. I wanted to do something more interesting that would help me grow and improve my technical skills.

I am a third year computer science student at the National University of Lesotho and in my freshman year, I took an introductory course to HTML and CSS on YouTube because there are no web development courses offered at school. I did this during my spare time when I took a break from my books and I was able to cover a lot more than I thought I would.

In my sophomore year I learned PHP through more YouTube tutorials and I did this for a couple of months but quit when things got hectic at school. One classmate of mine who had been doing PHP for a while then introduced me to Laravel, a PHP framework and i thought this would be the way to go since I had already started in PHP and he talked about how great it is. The plan was to get started with Laravel as soon as the semester came to an end but when it did, I was excited about something else, node.js.

So I started learning JavaScript so i could get into node.js. I loved JavaScript and I was excited about it and I felt node.js would be even more interesting. It was all good with node.js until I started struggling with some configurations for a long time and as a beginner I became overwhelmed and I then decided to take a different route.

Fast forward to 3 months ago when I got into ASP.NET. I read a blog of someone who came from the JavaScript world and got into C# and .NET, he was talking about how he started with this technology and how it worked out for him. The blog motivated me and I thought it wouldn’t hurt giving C# a try and in about a week I was hooked as I found it to be simple and interesting to work with.

I must say that after all this time learning one technology, switching to another as soon as I got interested in the new one didn’t make me any good at web development. So I learned a lot of technologies but what good are they if there is none that I am really good at? I think the best thing to do for one to be really good is to learn something until they get to a point where they master it before getting into something else.

However, having gone through all of these technologies had its benefits:

· I now found a technology that I really like and plan to focusing on.

· If I were to go back to using PHP or any PHP framework in the future, it would be very easy for me since I would not be starting from scratch.

· Wanting to learn node.js made me learn JavaScript which I probably had to learn anyway to become a web developer.

I am still in my early stage of being a .NET developer but my advice to new developers out there who feel they’re wasting their time would be to keep learning and trying out new things as much as possible until they find something they’ll like and then focus