How I Would Become a Developer Today

Key Takeaways

If I had to relearn how to be a developer in 2025, how would I do that? I've been developing apps and websites on the internet for a couple decades now. And things have definitely changed in that time and especially in the last few years. There's more tools, there's more services, there's more languages, more frameworks than there have ever been and there's more coming out every day. So in this video I'm just going to talk a little bit high level about what would I do if I had to start over? How would I approach this what probably feels like a very overwhelming ecosystem. So firstly I would say do not skip the basics the fundamentals of how your industry or how your medium operates. So if you're building for the web, if you're trying to build web apps, don't skip over how things work at a fundamental level. You don't have to learn it all deeply. You can learn as you go. But there's three foundational pieces that I think you should learn and look at and read about. Have AI help you talk about and understand these things. So number one, how does the web work at a fundamental level? How does a request and response cycle work? How does a client and a server work? What happens when you go to your browser and type in google.com? What is that flow? Second, HTML and CSS fundamentals. How does the DOM work? What is the DOM? You know, they have virtual DOM now, but where what came before virtual DOM? How do styles work? How does cascading stylesheets work? How does markup work? Just being able to read and understand markup and kind of play with it and modify it. You should definitely have a basic foundation understanding of that. And then number three, I think it's still important to pick a language. Find a language that you enjoy, that you like to read, but also that you like to write. It's still a very important skill. You have to know how to go into the code, write code, edit code, understand it, break it, fix it. So, pick a language and find one that you like to use. Find one that AI is good at using. right now that seems to be Typescript is is really good. The type safety of it and just the immense amount of resources that exist for React is is really good. Dovetailing off of that, I would also say pick an AI tool or ecosystem. Kind of in the same vein as picking a language, I think it's just as important these days to pick an AI ecosystem. If you can use open source, if you can run it locally, that's even better. But pick one of the big SAS operators that you like. For me, that just happens to be Anthropic. For you, that might be OpenAI, Google. Pick one. Learn those tools, use them, keep an eye out on the rest of the industry, and you might see other things you want to try or that you like. But in order to be productive, I think you really need to be good at one of those tools. So, pick one, stick with it for a while. If you don't like it, go try another one. The next thing I would do if I was learning how to be a dev in 2025 is I would absolutely leverage AI from the beginning. Some people might criticize that and say, "Hey, you just you got to learn you got to learn how to code." I really do see AI as just another tool. It's definitely an evolution of what we've been doing, but it would be foolish not to use AI when it provides such a monumental change in how we build. Things are already shifting. Employers are going to expect you to know how to use AI tools. Don't be ashamed of using it. Don't let it take over your critical thinking and always own the code that you push into a repo. But don't feel guilty using AI. It's just a tool. Next, what I would say is find other people that are starting out on a journey at a similar level as you. I've been doing mostly solo development for about 3 years now and I can definitely attest to how isolating that can be and I've definitely already felt myself sort of my my skills of just speaking about code has gone down because it's a skill just like anything else you need to exercise that skill. If you don't do it you're going to lose it. So find other people find communities out there find Discord. Find YouTube channels that you like. Find, you know, other people in your community that you can talk to, that you can collaborate with, that you can bounce ideas off of. Don't try to do it alone. Find someone that you can learn with together. And then finally, what I think is the most important is you just have to build. Build, build, and then build more. Break things, ship things, put things in production, share them with people. If you're not building, in my opinion, you're not really learning. If you're just out there watching YouTube videos, but you're not following along and trying it out and doing it on your own with your own hands and brain, you're you're going to kind of just let that information wash over you. But, you know, it would be as if you read a math book but didn't do any problems. So, build build something. It doesn't even matter what it is. Find something that solves a problem that you personally have and build it. Get it into production. Don't let it rot on your machine. build it, ship it, use it in production. When it breaks, fix it. So, those are the big things I would say if I was relearning how to be a dev in 2025. And that's kind of what I try to do on this channel. My name is Ronnie. If you're new to this channel, I've been a developer for a long time, but I kind of am starting over in that sense on this channel because AI is new to everyone. And I consciously have chosen to explore things that I've never used before. I'm pushing toward Cloudflare, TypeScript, AI tools. And so if any of that interests you, I invite you to subscribe to the channel. If you have any requests, go to buildscale.tv, scroll down to the bottom, submit the feedback form, tell me what you're looking for, and I'll probably make a video out of it. And with that, I thank you for watching. Good luck out there, and build