I’ve done web development as a hobby since the 90s as a wee lad, with a few paying gigs between then and now.
I’m a Network Engineer by trade, but have always had a passion for application development (C/C#, Commodore BASIC, Python, etc.), but I’ve found that keeping up with and staying current in those aforementioned topics has been far, far easier! I’m also a hardware junkie, so I pretty much dabble in all aspects tech, be it front end, back end, hardware, software, networking, etc.
Depending on the project, I’ll use all vanilla code, but sometimes it’s nice to use frameworks to quickly deploy something, and have something that someone who is familiar with said framework can administer long after I’ve departed; I’m still very anti-CMS, though I can appreciate its usefulness as a tool and will begrudgingly use it when appropriate.
I think one of the biggest issues I personally face in this particular discipline, is that I’m the only one of my friend group who’s into and understands this. I have no one I can dialog with one-on-one about stuff to bounce ideas off of and so on. I know I can always ask the kind folks around here, but I don’t feel comfortable bombarding the thread list!
My biggest weakness, and no one framework can fix this, is UX/UI design. I can make nice, easy UIs for desktop and mobile applications, but for some reason a webApp seems like a completely different ballgame, and it’s hard not feeling like what I’ve created is a copy-paste of another format. That’s also a personal issue I just need to build a bridge and get over If it works, it works and if the client’s happy, that’s all that matters.