Web developers -- some career questions for you

[Anonymous]

I am from a non-tech background but over the last 15 years have wound up developing skills in web development because a portion of my work involves marketing including website content and design. I've worked with a variety of web developers over the years and am interested in maybe building out this skill set more formally and taking my career in another direction where I am more focused on the technical aspects of this work instead of just on content and aesthetics.

If you were me (mid-career, non-technical background, some experience but no formal training), where would you start to begin exploring this as a possible career shift? Find a comprehensive program? Take a few classes? I would ask some of the web developers I've worked with but I am not sure if this is a realistic goal or not and since they are professional contacts I don't want to make myself look dumb so asking anonymously first. TIA for any advice!

[Anonymous]

Do you live in the DC area?

[Anonymous]

Have a good profolio of work and/or contribute to open source projects

I’d try to take some kind of formal class on software architecture — one concern I have with hiring self-taught developers is that they don’t have a good sense of how to write clean, well-organized code that’s easy to maintain. I wouldn’t sign up for a boot camp or a full degree or anything, just check out coursework on MIT ocw or look into something at a local community college.

[Anonymous]

What are you interested in doing? It sounds like front-end development could play to your strengths in design. If you want to do more infrastructure and functionality (back-end) then I would start with a toy project of making a website. I personally like the tutorials on https://www.w3schools.com/ but some of them are a bit old-school.

[Anonymous]

Take a fairly comprehensive frontend course at your own pace to see how you like it. I recommend Jonas Schmedtman's ultimate react course: https://www.udemy.com/user/jonasschmedtmann/

There is increased demand for web skills now that AI is all the rage. You could continue your education by taking Python courses, learning some AI frameworks, getting your feet wet with FastAPI. Take a look at other AI projects that have example web apps (autogen, llama index) and modify/extend them. Learn to use Viscose and git. Take am AWS or Azure course/cert to learn how to deploy apps to containers.

Play around with interface design, UI toolkits, CSS, Tailwind etc Build a full stack AI app and out it on your own GitHub site

Join the discord for a project you like and submit bug fixes, chat with the other developers on discord, etc.