alt Hacker NewsI would like to learn more about Web development and related knowledge (networking, security). Currently my programming knowledge is primarily system languages+python. I'm thinking of building a few websites / apps from scratch, and perhaps hosting my own server. Recommendations for frameworks or do's/don'ts are very welcome.
Second thing is networking skills at my (future) job. One thing I regret from my PhD is not seeking collaborators out more actively and building my network. Although I'm moving to industry, I've realised that having a strong professional network is vital for job security and can make the job much easier and more fun.
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For self-hosting: Buy a cheap VPS and use something like Coolify, Dokploy, or Dokku if you don't need a UI. These are half way in between "managed" PaaS (e.g. Vercel, Netlify, etc) and "hosting it yourself". Self-hosting is important experience but setting up reverse proxies, nginx, database backups, port-forwarding, firewall rules, secrets management, dependency updates, etc is not trivial. You should absolutely learn how to do those eventually but it's important to get something up and running first and the software I mentioned does just that for you
For building websites: If you don't already know HTML/CSS/JS definitely start with a vanilla site. No matter what framework is in right now, having the fundamentals down is absolutely a huge boost. So start with a simple static site. If you already have that knowledge, don't go crazy. React is basically the "boring technology" at this point and its not going anywhere anytime soon. Use Vite to create a basic React app
For web development I would say avoid high-level frameworks as much as you can. Most of them are built for hand-holding developers which is counterproductive to learning the fundamentals and are usually inflexible to demands outside the "happy path".