20 things I learned changing to a career in web development.

A quick observation at the last few months as a front-end developer.

You spend less time with people and more time with computers. You must be active in changing that. You have to read everything. Read — not skim. You could easily gain weight if you aren’t active enough. Force yourself to get up and do things. Work is no longer a 9-5. Which isn’t a bad thing cause nothing feels like “work”. Work projects and personal projects blend together. Again, not a bad thing. You might not build cool things at first. You probably have to ‘fix’ someone’s code at first. You’ll inherit code, and you’ll think its crap. But regardless of reasons why, you’ll need to learn to work with inherited code. Other code might look ‘ugly’ but you’ll learn from it. Your first job probably won’t be glamorous it might be boring and it might not be that ‘startup’ you read about in Tech Crunch. There aren’t many junior developers, so don’t be one. And the term ‘junior’ in web development doesn’t mean less knowledge, just less experience. Continuous education is your responsibility, not that of your company or industry. Stackoverflow. Google. Stackoverflow. Colleagues. Twitter Friends. Pray for help. Stackoverflow. Stackoverflow. Stackoverflow. Stackoverflow. Seek out critique from your peers, at your company or online. It’s easy to get lost in the black hole of projects. So make sure to pick your head up every now and then. Quality code takes time. Respect that. Learning is an active skill, not a passive one. You’re going to feel stuck — a lot. But you’ll figure it out. Your first job might not be sexy, but it’s a start. You’ll amaze yourself at what you can do.

Additional tips added by the Medium/Development Community

It’s increasingly difficult to get a job doing webdev as orgs tend to blend it w/ SDE or design. — @nickf Don’t forget to add MDN — @NateElliott

If interested, feel free to upvote on Hacker News and/or Designer News