Into the Web: My Start and the Scary Parts

How it all started

I remember the first time I picked up my computer to make my own website, opening youtube and finding tutorials on how to make your own website. The excitement little Abdullah has at that moment was amazing. The concept of having a website online on the internet, somewhere anyone could access it was just so appealing. I remember typing out the first lines of HTML and opening up that file on google. I felt like I was a part of something bigger.

From static HTML to CSS to Javascript, the learning curve was real. I was and still am a huge math enthusiast, following the passion I learnt python which helped me visualize those beautiful concepts I had in my mind. Learning python really brought me into the world of Computer Science. However there was such a stark contrast between Javascript and Python I simply got discouraged to do anything related to web development.

It was tough, I had so many Ideas of things I wanted to make public for everyone to see and use but this invisible and unnecessary hate towards javascript that I had never let me go further.

I was scared, I knew C/C++ but python was always the language I was most proficient in. I felt like most of the programming I did was abstracted pseudo-code. But that was what I loved about python, I loved that I always only focused on the logic of the code and never anything else. I loved that whenever I started doing things with python it would be as if I was solving a big puzzle. In short, It was a lot of fun using python, and other languages ESPECIALLY Javascript just didn’t seem appealing to me.

Here comes Flask

from flask import Flask


app = Flask(__name__)

@app.route('/')
def index():
    return "Hello World"

These couple lines of code changed everything, the fact that I could write websites in python without ever touching javascript(well sometimes) was so comforting. I started learning flask and made a very small blog for myself.

The fact that I never looked up a youtube tutorial and implemented my own logic to make a “Full Stack” website made me feel so accomplished. I fell like I had this whole new skillset and that a whole world full of possibilities just opened up to me. For as long as I can remember I have been so scared of things like async, promises, and session based things, but now equipped with an amazing web framework in my programming language of choice was amazing. It let me try out stuff and actually build something for once.

The blog in question isn’t the greatest blog of all time, but it is my own. It has a very “Malanaa” touch to it, giving off this 90’s mathematician vibe. A time where markdown formatting wasn’t a thing. It’s very raw and formatted such that it looks like that. Although not my intention this also made designing the whole website a heck a lot easier. This brings me to another point: look for frameworks to help you with everything, unless you’re trying to learn the underlying concept. I used tailwind css to design my whole website and it made life so much easier.

So what now?

I’ve learned javascript now and It always helps to have a whole arsenal of tools at your disposal, but I think that should not be that much of a concern if you’re just starting out. Do what you’re comfortable with and learn the concepts of the thing itself. Increase your toolkit once you have mastered those fundamentals.

About the Author

I’m Syed, a sophomore computer science student here at the University of North Texas. I’ve been into programming ever since I was 14 and I love sharing my geeky stories with fellow “geeks”