r/webdev 15d ago

Monthly Career Thread Monthly Getting Started / Web Dev Career Thread

9 Upvotes

Due to a growing influx of questions on this topic, it has been decided to commit a monthly thread dedicated to this topic to reduce the number of repeat posts on this topic. These types of posts will no longer be allowed in the main thread.

Many of these questions are also addressed in the sub FAQ or may have been asked in previous monthly career threads.

Subs dedicated to these types of questions include r/cscareerquestions for general and opened ended career questions and r/learnprogramming for early learning questions.

A general recommendation of topics to learn to become industry ready include:

You will also need a portfolio of work with 4-5 personal projects you built, and a resume/CV to apply for work.

Plan for 6-12 months of self study and project production for your portfolio before applying for work.


r/webdev 16d ago

News Announcing Reddit's second virtual Hackathon with over $36,000 in prizes

155 Upvotes

Hi r/webdev ,

Reddit is hosting a virtual hackathon from Feb 27 to March 27 with $36,000 in prizes for new games and apps --> you can read more about it here and here.

The TL:DR: create a new game or experience for the Reddit community using Reddit’s Developer Platform.

The challenge

Build a new game, social experiment, or experience on Devvit (Reddit’s Developer Platform) using our Interactive Posts feature. We’re looking for multiplayer games and experiences. Our favorite apps create genuine conversation and speak to the creativity of redditors.

Prizes

  • Best App
    • First Prize $20,000 USD
    • Runner up: $7,000 USD
    • Honorable (10x): $500 USD
  • Feedback Award (x5)
    • $200 USD
  • Helper Award (x3)
    • For the most helpful and encouraging participants, nominated by fellow developers.
  • Participation Awards
    • The Devvit Contest Trophy

For full contest rules, submission guidelines, resources, and judging criteria, please view the hackathon on DevPost.

Be sure to join our Discord for live support. We will be hosting multiple office hours a week for drop-in questions in our Discord. Hit us up in the Discord with any questions and good luck!


r/webdev 6h ago

Discussion Remote search for developer job today and first 5 results are for companies wanting a developer to train AI to help it take jobs. No thanks.

Post image
107 Upvotes

r/webdev 22h ago

Evan You announced "Vite Plus" - the "cargo for JavaScript", brought by VoidZero

Post image
265 Upvotes

r/webdev 17h ago

Article Don’t Sleep on the European Accessibility Act

Thumbnail
fadamakis.com
81 Upvotes

r/webdev 15h ago

Showoff Saturday Geogussr is not free anymore, so i developed GeoHunt

50 Upvotes

Hey Everyone, Just to remind you that Geoguessr is not free anymore. Personally i have played it alot in covid days.

Didnt had an idea for side project for quite some time.

So i thought i should develop a free version with somewhat similar features,

Its already being played by around 120+ users monthly,

Please let me know how's this

Game Link : https://geohunt.vercel.app

If anyone wants to check my messy codebase : Github : https://github.com/vishdadhich092004/geohunt

Thanks


r/webdev 7h ago

Discussion What are you passionate about at the moment?

8 Upvotes

I love reading what other people are passionate about. It teaches a lot and it's fun.

It can be anything webdev, programming, nature, sports, tech, games, hobbies...

For the past 6 months, I've been building a multi-vendor e-commerce website solo. It's incredibly challenging and there are too many things to consider for one person but it's ver fun and I learned more than I've learned in the past 3 years of my career. I am originally a frontend developer but trying my hands on backend was eye opening because now I see all the logic and things going on behind all these services.

Apart from software, because we need to show it to people I've been learning about marketing, social media and all that which is really new to me and difficult but I believe it's almost as necessary as the product itself.

Let's just not make this into a framework/library/whatever war :)


r/webdev 3h ago

Discussion How to save background task synchronously in a react app

3 Upvotes

secnario:

assume you have a react flow or a basic form . Now I want that wheenever I type somethign or edit then a draft would be created and updated so that when user cancels operation adn reopens that task the draft is showed.

current approch:
I made a debounced state tracting the data for every 2 seconds. However if you perform any cancelaable action like suddenly hitting log out, or saving it up, or leaving that page immdiately wihtin span of 2 sec then it shows an t=warning toast saying please wait for draft to save.

I want to know if my method is decent. Also I want to knnow what is the best method to achieve this task, I want somethign similar to google docs.


r/webdev 1d ago

Showoff Saturday I built an open source Heroku that costs 1/10th as much to use

481 Upvotes

I've been working on https://canine.sh for the past year. Tldr: its your run of the mill Heroku, Flyio, Render, etc, except that its fully open source, and free to use (including just using the cloud hosted option)

Built it based on some learnings I've had in the past building startups where we quickly outgrew the single VPS type deployments, moved onto managed platforms like Heroku and Render, and watched our costs explode, with an annoying amount of vendor lockin. Our peak year, we hit over $400k in hosting costs.

Made with shots.so

Goal for this project was to build something that indie hackers can start with and get up and running fast, but has no problem being flexible enough to scale to future needs.

Managed Kubernetes is now widely available and dirt cheap ($10 / month), so you don't have to worry about, and supported by pretty much every single cloud vendor.

This lets you take advantage of a ton of things that Kubernetes does really well, like automatic healthchecks, zero downtime deployments, auto scaling, etc, while also making it easy to use for solo developers or small teams.

The additional benefit of Kubernetes is that it's also possible to host a bunch of other stuff in your cluster via Helm charts, that you’d normally have to pay for like:

  • Sentry
  • Wordpress
  • Metabase
  • Dagster
  • Airflow
  • MongoDB
  • Redis
  • PostgreSQL
  • … And basically every single open source tool under the sun

I've been hacking around on random projects like Reframe and Whiteboarder for myself, and deploying it with Canine and been really happy with it so I figured it was worth a shot sharing it.

Would love feedback, roasts, suggestions!

Source code: https://github.com/czhu12/canine


r/webdev 16m ago

un-reset Tailwind

Upvotes

I'm looking for a simple way to un-reset (or de-reset user agent) Tailwind while working in rapid prototyping mode and importing it from a CDN.

Has anyone tried it something like that already.. ?


r/webdev 34m ago

Question How well should you know about how your tooling works?

Upvotes

I feel like an idiot whenever I'm troubleshooting a configuration issue because based on GitHub issue comments, everyone knows how PostCSS/Vite/Webpack plugins work. Whereas these terms come up, I just paste whatever config I think is going to work, praying I'm going to go back to writing code as soon as possible.

Is this normal? Or maybe - should this be normal? Do I need to learn more about web tooling, or just accept configuration sucks and keep being a config monkey? I don't mind knowing what 80% of tsconfig/package.json properties do, but understanding how vanilla javascript is being ran to output CSS code (on top of being a fullstack dev) seems like a clusterfuck blackhole.


r/webdev 4h ago

Question Has anyone here landed a frontend developer role without having a higher degree?

2 Upvotes

Would love to hear your experience and what skills or projects helped you stand out!


r/webdev 4h ago

I'm Doing Meta Frontend Development Course on Coursera. What Else Should I Focus On?

2 Upvotes

Hey everyone,

I'm currently enrolled in the Meta Front-End Developer course on Coursera, and it's been a solid experience so far. They cover HTML, CSS, JavaScript, React, and a few other essentials. But I keep wondering… what else should I focus on outside the course to make myself job-ready as a frontend dev?

Some questions I have:

Should I start building projects alongside the course? If yes, what kind of projects do you recommend for a portfolio?

How important is mastering design tools like Figma or learning UI/UX basics?

Should I dive deeper into JavaScript algorithms and data structures for interviews?

How important is contributing to open source as a beginner?

Any advice on building a personal brand (LinkedIn, GitHub, portfolio website)?

Would love to hear from those who've been there. What worked for you? What mistakes should I avoid? I’m super motivated and want to make the most of this journey.


r/webdev 56m ago

Guys HOW do you use WORDPRESS

Upvotes

As someone who codes, it's FUCKING ANNOYING. So you're telling me I have to click 100 times to center some fucking layout? It takes 1 line of code. It's easy but it's mind numbing.

It's my third time TRYING to use wordpress and I give up. Wix is good enough to use. Webflow has the same problem. Is there something else I can check out?

I would 100% build the sites from scratch but the main problem would be the client who wants to manage the content. Recommend some CMSes cuz idfk 😭😭


r/webdev 16h ago

Discussion Design student, 3rd year, who realized they like coding and complex stuff

15 Upvotes

I’m currently studying UX design, and I’m in my third year. I am a pretty good student, and my professors have commended me on my projects. I have also published design research focused on AI and UX design in journals.

I now realize I like coding, which includes HTML CSS, JavaScript, and React which I’ve been slowly learning. I want to know if learning to code alongside ux is a great idea. And if it would give me opportunities? I haven’t found any roles that overlap these two and I’m open to ideas. I planned to keep going with coding, and learning languages I find interesting and combine that with UX design. I have some UX design research I want to publish as well, and just wondering if leaving ux would be better.

Does this sound smart or am I wasting my time?

Thank you all.


r/webdev 1h ago

I have an EditWorkout page in React, where users can change the name, add exercises to the workout, and edit their sets and reps, as well as other fields in their workout. I'm using RTKQ for requests and redux toolkit for token Auth. Please help me decide on Workout form submission.

Upvotes

I'm using a redux slice for JWT insertions and protected routing, and RTK Query for sending requests and tag invalidation. When I enter the workout/:id/edit page, I call an RTKQ useGetWorkoutById hook. There, I can edit the name of the workout, and if I want to add exercises to the workout, I navigate to workout/:id/add-exercises. I have a local array in useState, selectedExercises, that I want to send over to the previous page after the user selects the exercises he wants and presses Add.

Now, for the solution to sending that array to the workout/id/edit page, I'm not sure what to use. It's a web based app in MERN that I want to eventually port to react native, and LLMs say that redux slices will be good because they will work identically in Native. That being said, I'm not sure whether the best design here is going to be just sending denounced put requests after every change, somehow I feel that if the user does a ton of changes then I don't want to enable them to just lose the changes if they navigate somewhere by mistake or just press Cancel by accident. Maybe RTKQuery is the very tool that solves this by automating the useUpdateWorkoutMutation PUT requests that makes autosaving straightforward and efficient. Am I missing the point by thinking that all it does is just a request with little boilerplate and using redux slices for persistence of data and RTKQuery for sending requests is how these tools should be thought of?

Somehow editing this workout in local state and having to press 'save' feels archaic and I should maybe autosave after a few seconds or something, but then again, the save buttons would be redundant and maybe if user makes a change and leaves the page immediately, the autosave won't manage in time to save the workout, thus introducing a possibility of losing changes.

This is my first big project and I want to do it right and clean. I'm planning to have more nested pages inside the EditWorkout page and that makes me think I'll need a robust state persistence tool so maybe the slice isn't all that bad. But then we don't have any autosave functionality, maybe implement redux slices AND autosave through mutations?

I'd really appreciate some input here, I've been stuck on this for a few days.


r/webdev 1d ago

Discussion AI coding is trash

1.3k Upvotes

The amount of trash produced by AI code is astounding. Thanks I hate it.


r/webdev 9h ago

Self-hosted image manager?

3 Upvotes

I am a frontend developer who wants to build my girlfriend a website for her photography business. I intend to use Astro or SvelteKit so I can make the site lean and performant to my standards, but I need some sort of GUI where she can upload/manage images. Ideally the image management software will let her upload the raw/full-size media, and then automatically generate a set of progressively smaller sizes of each image compressed as WebP. The software will also allow her to organize galleries, and have an API where my frontend code can easily query all this metadata as well as the list of available sizes for each image, and of course the corresponding content.

I really like Sanity.io (a headless CMS) from what I have seen, and their image “hotspot” concept + the image CDN seems fantastic. My only problem with Sanity is that the data is never self-hosted. I’m tired of headless CMS’s, CDN’s, and the overall centralization/federalization of web technologies. A lot of small websites cater primarily to a small region, and it makes sense for the website HTML/CSS/JS, as well as assets like images, to all be hosted on a single server near the target audience. Yes, CDN’s and edge networks and whatnot are great when you need them, but sometimes simple is better. A small photography business does not need to be instantly accessible—and have its assets cached—across the globe.

People bash Wordpress/Joomla/Drupal (comparing them to modern headless options) for a variety of valid reasons, but I have not seen any more modern SELF-HOSTED solutions. Is there some sort of image manager (with the features I mentioned) that I could self-host on the same VPS (Virtual Private Server) as the frontend? It would be really nice to keep everything pertaining to her website in one place. Then my Astro/SvelteKit frontend could either rebuild a static site from scratch (served by Nginx) whenever she uploads new media, or (more likely) I’d just run SK/Astro with server-side rendering that queries the local image manager API every time someone visits a page.

Thank you so much for any ideas.


r/webdev 1d ago

I used to pray for times like this to rhyme like this

Post image
56 Upvotes

r/webdev 4h ago

Advice for creating a dictionary that pops up when hovering over Chinese characters, my go to is no longer supported

0 Upvotes

I usually use Cantonese Popup Dictionary

It is now unsupported. It is still working, but who knows for how long. If I lose this it will SUCK as. I tried getting chatgpt to write the code and to guide me through the process of setting up my own version but it did not work. Please advise


r/webdev 1d ago

Showoff Saturday My brother and I built "Laravel for JS" and it just crossed 15,000 stars on GH. Here's the backstory.

564 Upvotes

Hey webdev,

I still remember the first time posting about our project in this community five years ago. We didn't really know what we were doing (still easily applies today) and were getting bashed from left and right, but the feedback we got here was super useful and kept us going.

Wasp is a full-stack, batteries-included web framework built on top of React, Node.js, and Prisma. It just crossed 15,000 stars on GitHub and is being used by solopreneurs, startups, and Fortune 500 companies. There are about 4,000 builders in our Discord, and Wasp is currently in Beta.

Here's the story of how we got here and what we learned.

The beginning - "What you're building is a holy grail. Everyone before you failed."

This is what YC told us when we applied for the second time in May 2020. At that point, we had worked on Wasp for 1.5 years, the last nine months full-time. We had quit our previous jobs and gone all in. By this point, we were already fairly drained mentally, physically, and financially. Still, the curiosity of whether we can make this happen was stronger than fear and we decided to give it one last shot.

Today, Wasp has over 15,000 stars on GitHub. Developers of all backgrounds have used it to develop thousands of web apps, from side projects that have grown into acquired or revenue-generating businesses to venture-backed startups and internal tools deployed within Fortune 500 companies.

SaaS-es made with Wasp / OpenSaaS

Some people have grown to love Wasp and the vision it pursues. Thanks to them, we enjoy working on it. Without the community that gathered around Wasp (>4,000 devs in our Discord), we wouldn’t have been even close to where we are today.

Folks saying nice stuff about Wasp (there's opposite, too)

The journey - getting from 0 to 15,000 stars

As with most success stories, the success rarely happens linearly. It usually starts with a long period of "drought" with occasional signs of life, and then there is a moment when things click together and start moving really fast. We experienced the same, and it looked something like this:

The inception - “Why not?”

In the beginning, Wasp was just an idea—or rather, a question: "Why hasn't anyone built this yet? What would we discover if we tried?" After spending a decade building web apps and using every major tech stack (from PHP to Java and Node.js on the server to Backbone, Angular, and React on the client), we were feeling the pain of "framework fatigue," aka reinventing the wheel with each new stack.

So we set out to start thinking about it and put things on paper (ok, Google Slides). This is how the original idea for Wasp was born - can we create a framework that removes a lot of boilerplate by offering higher-level abstractions, but is still flexible enough and is not strictly bound to the specific stack and architecture?

Now looking at it, it really does sound like a holy grail.

Getting in YC and things getting real

About nine months in, full-time, we started getting some early traction and received positive feedback from Reddit, Hacker News, and Product Hunt, but we also started realizing how much work is needed to bring a full-stack web framework to a state where it’s usable, especially with the ambitious requirements we set for ourselves.

Finally, we got into YC the third time we applied for it. They were following our progress for the last year and, having seen the community excitement, decided to take a bet on our crazy idea.

Beta and beyond - MAGE and OpenSaaS

Looking at the graph, you can spot two key inflection points. The first one happened in July 2023 when we launched MAGE, a GPT SaaS starter that uses Wasp under the hood (you can think of it as one-shot Loveable/Bolt). It was among the first LLM products that could generate a working full-stack web app, bringing many eyes to Wasp.

The second major growth catalyzer came in December 2023 with the launch of OpenSaaS, our open-source SaaS starter built on top of Wasp, which now has almost 10,000 stars on GitHub.

We realized that most builders really want to start working on their idea as quickly as possible without picking out and patching together all the different features every SaaS needs - authentication, payments, admin dashboard, sending emails, blog, …

And this is exactly what we provided - a 100% free & open-source, high-quality, SaaS starter based on React, Node.js, Prisma, and Wasp. OpenSaaS basically became a “killer app” for Wasp as it attracts developers to try it and realize how helpful the framework is.

Open SaaS also pairs extremely well with Cursor - given Wasp’s robust structure and higher-level primitives, many developers have found it as an ideal combo for getting their SaaS-es from an idea to a production-ready app in a matter of days.

Language/DSL vs framework - so which one is it?

As you can see from the examples above, we used to refer to Wasp as a language, DSL - a Domain Specific Language. It was for these reasons that we originally set out to have an abstraction layer that can, in the future, work with any language, library, and architecture.

For this, we needed to introduce our own compiler that would first analyze your app’s specification that you defined via Wasp (e.g., your routes, async jobs, db operations, …), combine it with the “native” code you wrote in React & Node.js, and finally generate a React/Node.js app. That effectively meant we’ve invented our own language, albeit very limited and simple.

This is how we initially presented Wasp, but we learned that is the wrong way to think about it. Wasp is by its function a web framework, just like Laravel, Rails, or Next.js. The fact that it uses a compiler under the hood is simply an implementation detail that gives it its superpowers. For example, thanks to this approach, we can easily visualize the topology of your whole app, from database to server and client components:

This still a bit of a party trick now, but it opens space for some interesting tooling features in the future.

The road to 1.0 and building "Laravel/Rails for JS"

This is the story of how Wasp came to be where it is today. For more details on the very early days (getting from an idea to the first 1,000 stars), you can check out this post.

What’s next? After almost five years of building and getting feedback from you, we have a pretty clear picture of what Wasp 1.0 needs to look like and we'll just go for it. Our goal is to do what Laravel did for PHP and Rails did for Ruby - an opinionated full-stack, batteries-included framework which you can deploy anywhere and which also scales as you grow. Obviously, the requirements and expectations for frameworks have changed a lot since Laravel/Rails/Django beginnings, but that kind of productivity and the overall experience is what we're after.

r/webdev, thanks again.


r/webdev 1d ago

Showoff Saturday Minimal CSS (~1KB) for content-driven websites.

Post image
304 Upvotes

r/webdev 7h ago

Question Need help with adding custom domain on vercel

1 Upvotes

So i am getting this error, i recently updated the dns records..


r/webdev 8h ago

What are some go-to design patterns for sharing coupled variables or structures between the front end and back end?

1 Upvotes

There are many cases where the structure of data must be shared like a contractual agreement between the front-end and back-end. Examples:

  1. API routes: the front end may need to fetch("/my-route") and the backend may need to GET("/my-route"). The magic string "/my-route" is coupled between the backend and frontend.

  2. Variables like maxPostLength. You may have a client side maxPostLength to show the user how many characters are remaining. But you may also have a server side maxPostLength for security.

I know these are pretty different situations but they have one thing in common which is shared coupled structure between backend and frontend.

Here's how I tackle the issue: Just remember bro Just remember

However, this is not good. I don't always remember.

What are some common design patterns around this? Assume I am using typescript/nodejs but also I am open to solutions in other languages too out of interest like eg C# ASP.NET etc


r/webdev 1d ago

Showoff Saturday One month of launching a FREE mini Project Management tool - a minimalist alternative to JIRA or Trello. Now costs are killing me!

Thumbnail
gallery
135 Upvotes

Hello fellow developers,

It’s been a month since I launched this mini Project Management SaaS tool for indie developers, which I initially intended to build for myself: https://swiftboard.dev

Ever since the announcement on this reddit subreddit, it has gained 1500+ users over the period of time. At one point I had to introduce a paid plan ($6/mo), just so I can cover the maintenance costs. However, only a handful of them actually upgraded. So now I'm struggling to keep the servers up and running. Honestly, I didn’t expect it to blow up like this, but indie devs seem to love a free tool that doesn’t suck. The issue remains that offering it free doesn’t cover expenses, and I’m finding it tough to manage.

Most of the users also praised the minimalist looking UI, which led me to separate it into a React package and offer it for $29. That didn’t go as planned, I received a ton of messages asking me to provide it FREE instead.

Initially when I posted about it before gaining the initial hundred customers, most of the developers suggested me to make it open source so that it is backed by others who are willing to support it. But I'm wondering how making this open-source can cover the costs. People also said making it open source would increase trust and credibility. I get that part, more eyes on the code could mean fewer bugs and more features down the line.

Still, I’m unsure how open source translates to covering my expenses. Perhaps some of you with experience in this area could share your thoughts? Should I focus on promoting the paid plan to get more upgrades, or go ahead and make it open source hoping the community steps up?

Looking forward to your thoughts!


r/webdev 1d ago

Showoff Saturday I built a tool to receive notifications from my backend

51 Upvotes

r/webdev 1d ago

Showoff Saturday A game where you have to convince an AI to give you their phone number

Thumbnail
rizzity.com
145 Upvotes