Is Web Development Computer Science or Graphic Design?
When I was in college, one of the things I really, really didn’t like about the Computer Science program was that almost all of the programs you made were run from the command line and output to the command line. In fact, the first multi-window user interface we made was a Software Engineering class in my junior year.
I always found that to be backwards (I fully realize I am the minority here). I found it strange that we had classes on algorithms, math, data structures and more before we ever saw a window with some buttons in it, or a web page.
Do you need that stuff (the behind-the-scenes’y stuff) before you can possibly worry about a visual frontend? Is learning GUI before the underlying structures that make it possible sort of like putting the chicken before the egg?
For me, it was not. The first programming book I ever picked up was in 8th grade: Programming for Dummies, naturally. It was an introductory book that used BASIC to teach simple programming skills It was cool enough, but nothing spectacular. The final chapter, which was sort of a “bonus” chapter, was an introduction to HTML and CSS.
When I read that chapter, it was like a light clicked on in my brain. You could literally create a file right on your desktop, put some basic HTML “code” into it, and run it on your browser. And HTML was incredibly simple compared to programming languages…I could copy-and-paste snippets of code from various websites into my own projects and have them just work.
From there, I started checking out books on JavaScript, CSS, XHTML (oops), and more from the library. I made websites for my Boyscout troop, my teachers, and a chatroom/photo-sharing page for our senior-year trip to Spain.
But when it came time for college (after dinking around with majoring in Graphic Design, then Education, then finally Computer Science) I realized that most of the programming classes had GUI as an afterthought, at best.
Today, we are smart enough to realize that the two “camps” (frontend and backend) are different enough to be divided into separate job titles, or even teams. But I think college has been too slow to reflect on this trend and accommodate it. Neither Graphic Design nor Computer Science are really going to fully prepare you for a web development job.
When younger people ask me “What do I major in to get a job in web development” I tell them to major in Computer Science and minor in Graphic Design. That way you learn to think about the user who will be interacting with your page/application, but you also learn all the tools to actually make it happen.
After seeing quite a few positions filled with people who have the skills but no degree (and no student loans!) I think my new best-answer is going to be to go to a bootcamp. You will learn the majority of the algorithms you will need, frontend skills, teamwork, and more.
Would love to hear some opinions on this!
