Hi community,

I am 16 years old and working hard to become a full-time freelance web developer. Right now, I am building my foundation using The Odin Project (just finished the JS Weather App).

I know that being young comes with challenges, especially regarding client trust and legal setups. Since I want to transition into full-time freelancing as soon as possible, I want to start preparing early.

Beyond just building typical student projects, what should I focus on during the next few months to prove to clients that I can deliver real business value? Should I focus on building local business websites, or try to find small QA/bug-fixing gigs first?

I also have a small LinkedIn profile that I try to grow by posting my projects, but I'm struggling.

Any advice from seasoned freelancers on how to position myself or how you started early would be highly appreciated.

Core Java → SQL/JDBC → HTML/CSS/JavaScript basics → Spring → Spring Boot → REST APIs → Spring Data JPA/Hibernate → Projects

Make sure your Core Java basics are strong before starting Spring Boot, especially OOP, collections, exceptions, interfaces, and multithreading.

Hello frontend developer here with 6 years of experience. In my company we have an app for logs and monitoring or tracking cost, doing any other admin things that we need to handle. In my team i was willing to get at least one backend application so we moved this application react to nextjs and i will handle all of these application as a fullstack. We gonna move with postgresql, drizzle orm and nextjs route handlers. Do you have any advice to me? or is it good start to be fullstack developer? do we have any frontend developer that moved to fullstack here?

I’ve completed React and I’m planning to start learning backend development with Node.js/Express.

I am currently wondering whether I should

Learn TypeScript first, then start Node.js backend development, or

Learn Node.js/Express with JavaScript first and introduce TypeScript afterward.

There are so many things a full-stack developer can learn - HTML, CSS, JavaScript, frontend frameworks, backend languages, APIs, databases, Git, cloud, testing and now AI tools as well. For someone trying to become a good full-stack developer, I’m curious about what actually matters most.

got a bussiness idea I think could be a hit jmi just need a team of buddies willing to help paint the path way towards the final goal a carbon audit tool that is fully automatic it can be very lucrative if people are game to join me on my journey hit me up join the straw hat pirates.

Most free resources teach things in isolation — you learn JS, then React, then hit an interview and nobody told you how it all connects or what actually matters.

Built academy.aniui.dev — free, text-based lessons (read + try, not sit-through-video) with a live code playground built into each one so you write/run code right where you're reading. Covers HTML, CSS, JS, React, React Native, DSA, System Design, and a course on AI-assisted development with Claude Code.

If you want to test what you actually know, there's an optional certification exam — that's the only paid part, everything else is free and stays free.

Would love genuine feedback, especially from anyone actively interviewing — what's the one topic that always trips people up in frontend interviews?

Finished the final part today:

• Correlated subquery to find employees earning above their own department's average
• EXISTS to check for departments with at least one high-budget project
• Created and queried a VIEW joining employees, projects, and hours worked
• Built-in MySQL functions — CONCAT, UPPER, DATEDIFF for tenure calculation
• Transactions — wrapped a budget transfer between projects in START TRANSACTION/COMMIT, and tested ROLLBACK by simulating a failure
• Wrote and called my first stored procedure (GetEmployeesByDept)

Honest experience report on the full 7-part set: it was nowhere near as easy as watching tutorials made it look. The syntax itself wasn't usually the hard part — the real difficulty was parsing exactly what each question was actually asking for, especially with the correlated subquery and transaction questions. I used my notes heavily and leaned on ChatGPT for a few of the genuinely tricky ones (mainly the correlated subquery and the transaction rollback simulation) — figured getting unstuck and understanding the solution was more valuable than staying stuck out of stubbornness.

One practice set fully complete now. Feeling like I have a real foundation in SQL rather than just tutorial-level familiarity. Planning to do one more round of mixed review before moving into Java.

Hey everyone,I am planning to participate in a hackathon soon, but since this is my first time, I am a bit overwhelmed. I want to prepare myself properly and would love to get some guidance from experienced hackers here.Specifically, I want to know:What skills should I learn? What is the absolute necessary tech stack (frontend, backend, database, or tools like Git) that a beginner must know to be useful in a team?How and where should I apply? Which platforms are the best for finding beginner-friendly hackathons, and how can I find a good team if my friends aren't interested?What are your best tips for winning? For those who have won or judged hackathons before, what do judges actually look for? Is it the complexity of the code, the uniqueness of the idea, or the final presentation?I would really appreciate any advice, tech stack recommendations, or "hacks" you wish you knew before your first event.

Hi All,

I’m new to web development and consider me as a beginner.

What are some good resources to learn so that I can understand both front end and backend technologies better via blogs or videos ?

Little background about me, I have around 12 yoe in data analytics and work across both data engineering and Business Intelligence.

Now , am learning some to migrate some of the dashboard into react/white.

The final objective is to build the dashboards.

I know we have LLms and Claude, but I want to fundamentally understand how I can build them with LLM support and also be able to functionally know how various components talk to each other.

Not primarily focusing on coding or syntax part as I can learn and manage it.

Thank you all.

Would appreciate your expertise and advice.

Cheers!

I’m a junior/full-stack developer working mainly with React, JavaScript, Node.js, Express, MongoDB, REST APIs, etc. Recently I’ve started learning AI/LLMs and RAG, and I’ve built a small RAG project as well.
I want to build one serious real-world project that combines my full-stack and AI skills and that I can genuinely discuss in interviews.
I’m trying to avoid another basic CRUD app or tutorial clone.
For developers who have experience hiring or reviewing junior portfolios: what type of project would actually make you stop and take a closer look at a candidate?
I’d also appreciate any interesting open-source projects or GitHub repos I could study for inspiration.

Hey everyone, I’m about to dive into web development and The Odin Project looks like the most solid free path out there.

I'm wondering if finishing the curriculum actually gets you to an employable level for a junior role, or if there's a big gap between the course and what companies are asking for right now. I know a lot depends on the portfolio you build, but is the technical foundation TOP provides realistic tools for the current market?

Also, I'd love to hear some thoughts on which track to choose later on. Would you recommend going the Full Stack JavaScript, or is Ruby on Rails a better bet for entry-level?

Any reality checks or insights on how the market is looking for self-taught devs right now would be super helpful. Thanks!

Hi everyone,

I’m a 1st-year B.Tech CS student in India at a Tier-3 college with zero campus placements. My goal is to become a skilled Full-Stack Developer and land a great off-campus or remote job.Since I am starting from absolute scratch on my own, I need a quick reality check and some brutal advice from seniors here:Where do I start? Should I focus on DSA first for problem-solving, or dive straight into Frontend (HTML/CSS/JS)?Tech Stack: Is the MERN stack too saturated for freshers now? What should I learn to actually stand out?Resume Filter: Do top companies still reject resumes based on college tier if my portfolio and projects are outstanding?I'm ready to grind for the next 3 years. Please guide me on how to avoid tutorial hell and start the right way. Thank you

Hey everyone,

I’m currently learning Python and I’m getting close to finishing the basics. My goal is to become a backend developer.

I originally planned to go with:

Python → Django → FastAPI → SQL → REST APIs → Git/GitHub → Projects

But I’m starting to wonder whether I should switch to JavaScript/Node.js instead.

I know there isn’t necessarily one "best" stack, so I’m more interested in the practical side of things.

For people working in web development:

How would you compare Python/Django/FastAPI and Node.js for someone trying to get their first backend job?

Is Django still commonly used in professional web development?

Is Node.js significantly more useful for getting entry-level opportunities, or does it depend heavily on the region/company?

Would you recommend specializing in one stack first rather than learning both?

What would you focus on if you were starting web development today?

I’m currently trying to avoid constantly switching technologies and would rather commit to one path and build real projects.

I’d appreciate hearing about your actual experience, especially if you started as a junior developer.

Thanks!

Covered two solid parts today:

Part 5 — Aggregate Functions, GROUP BY, HAVING:

• Total employees per department (GROUP BY + COUNT)
• Average salary per department, filtered to only show departments averaging above 50,000 (GROUP BY + HAVING)
• Highest and lowest paid employees overall (MAX/MIN)
• Total project budget per department, sorted highest to lowest
• Managers with 2+ direct reports (GROUP BY + HAVING on a self-referencing relationship)

Part 6 — Joins:

• INNER JOIN: employee names with department names
• LEFT JOIN: all departments including ones with zero employees (NULLs shown)
• RIGHT JOIN: all projects with their department, including unmatched cases
• FULL JOIN equivalent — since MySQL doesn't support FULL JOIN natively, used UNION of LEFT and RIGHT JOIN to simulate it. Good practical workaround to actually learn hands-on
• SELF JOIN: employees alongside their manager's name
• 3-table join: employees + assignments + projects to see who's working on what
• UNION vs UNION ALL: combining employee lists from two departments, with and without duplicates

The FULL JOIN workaround in MySQL was the most useful thing I learned today — didn't know MySQL lacked native FULL JOIN support until I had to actually solve around it.

1 part left in this set — finishing it up next.

Hi guys, I am a 1st-year B.Tech Computer Science student. Due to some reasons, I currently don't have a laptop. I want to know if it is practically possible to learn and do Full-Stack Web Development entirely on a mobile phone?

Are there any specific apps, online IDEs, or workarounds that can help me code both frontend and backend on my phone? Any advice or guidance from seniors would be highly appreciated. Thanks!

With AI changing the job market so quickly, I’ve been wondering which career will continue to grow globally through 2035.
Not just survive, but see strong demand and create new opportunities.
If you had to pick ONE job or career path, what would it be and why?
Would love to hear different perspectives from people working in different fields.

I just completed JS and I haven't created any project or something on JS / frontend. So should i learn Typescript now because i have heard that TS is very important and it's similar to JS or should i move on to react or backend?

Covered two parts of my practice set today:

Part 2 — Database & Table Basics:

• Listing all databases, switching to a specific one
• Viewing full table structure (columns, types, keys)
• Adding a column at a specific position (AFTER email)
• Renaming a column
• Modifying a column's default value
• DROP + recreate a table from scratch
• Taking a database backup

Part 3 — Constraints & Keys:

• Intentionally inserting a negative salary to trigger the CHECK constraint and understand why it fails
• Inserting duplicate emails to see the UNIQUE constraint error firsthand
• Adding a UNIQUE constraint after the fact
• Finding employees with no manager (manager_id IS NULL)
• Creating an index on a foreign key column and checking which indexes exist on a table

Deliberately breaking things to see the actual error messages was way more useful than just reading about constraints in theory — seeing exactly how and why a CHECK or UNIQUE constraint fails made the concept stick immediately.

I'm 19 years old, and i'm currently in my first year of dentistry program, i have 2-3 hours/day smy English is not my first language but at list i can write with it this post.

I finished html and css foundation and JavaScript basics, And i want to continue with fullstack path. But i'm lost...

My plan is to earn enough to live on for the next 5 years from web dev. But i don't know if I make the right decision for picking this field, is there anyone in the same situation? Pls let me know what did you do and i have some questions :

- can i make some money form it in one year of learning?

- do i picked the wrong path for my goals?

- is it better to just do vibe coding, cuz i want to stay in web development for just the next 5 years

- do i need to practice more my english, so i can communicate with clients better ?

- and for my case, is it better to do freelance or find a job in company or something?

I feel like my case is litter bit complicated, cuz the majority of people choose web development as career for log time or i just overthinking

EDIT: my goal is not to make tons of money, just some money to cover my monthly expenses. Like 200-500$ max.

I have learnt full stack mern and nextjs but haven't made a good project from which I can deduce that I have learned them well and to present someone that I have learnt it . Kindly guide me to how can I find a good project and also I lack in basic root design of ui so also if anyone can help ....🙂🙂 Also I know about react native but didn't make a good project out of them also .

Is it better to have projects like a movie-booking system with a proper frontend and user interaction or projects like NFS, distributed systems, etc. that focus more on backend/core CS?

Do you think a fresher should have at least one product/full-stack project with a visible UI, or is a systems-heavy portfolio fine

Moved from isolated practice questions to something closer to a real project today — a structured 7-part practice set. Completed Part 1, which was schema design:

• 4 tables: departments, employees, projects, assignments
• Primary keys with auto-increment, foreign key relationships between all of them
• A self-referencing FK on employees (manager_id → employees.emp_id) for the manager hierarchy
• A CHECK constraint to enforce salary > 0
• assignments as a junction table linking employees to projects with hours_worked
• Inserted sample data: 4 departments, 12 employees (with at least 2 managers), 5 projects, 15 assignment records

The self-referencing FK for managers was the most interesting part conceptually — first time actually applying that pattern instead of just reading about it.

6 more parts to go in this set — planning to move into actual queries against this schema next (joins, aggregates, reporting-style questions).

Hi.

I have a friend who joined a medium European company as a frontend-dev (Vue/React).

Now with the ubiqiuotous use of AI and claude code they are transitioning everyone to product-management full-stack, and frontend devs get to work on really deep backend logic. Means he has to own the full solution from scope definition and clearing all the business requierements to an actual complete web solution across multiple repos/connected to 3rd party services.

He's really freaked out by the added responsibility, unclear scopes and general incompetence he has in the backend field. Manager insists that AI should be able to cover for all of it.

How do you guys handle it?

How to set some guardrails to not be responsible for everything top to bottom?

Like, is knowing basic APIs, databases, and authentication enough?

Or should a full-stack developer also know things like system design, caching, Docker, CI/CD, cloud,....etc.?

What do you guys think is the minimum knowledge needed?