How to become a successful web developer in 2025

Why do you need a plan before writing a single line of code?

I invite you to be open-minded, so open your mind, and let’s do a simple exercise—an exercise of imagination—where you picture yourself stepping into a forest, a vast forest with no map, no compass, and no real sense of direction. Your target is to find a way to get out of that forest.

So what do you do?

You start walking with the hope to find a way. The more you walk, the more you realize you’re lost, and then confusion starts to creep in, confusion starts to take over, and you become more and more unsure if you’re even heading in the right direction.Do you feel what I’m going with this? Is this a common scenario you can picture or you’ve seen so many times in movies?

I strongly believe this is how it can feel to start learning web development without a plan.

I have mentored people for decades into becoming web developers and guided them toward the best way to embrace the digital world. And let me tell you what the reality is, what I’ve seen and experienced: I’ve seen—too many times—tens and tens of people, too many people, jumping straight into coding tutorials. And I can tell you from the bottom of my heart: the worst thing you can do is blindly follow tutorials without understanding what you’re doing and why you’re doing it.

You can end up spending three months, six months, years watching videos, copy-pasting code, and building simple projects without ever wondering why—without ever taking a step back to figure out what truly makes a successful web developer. And I haven’t even got to the part where you start trying to get a job or a client, when you experience failure after failure, when you start to realize you’re missing skills—other skills than just writing code.

Are you starting to see that web development is not just about coding?

That’s why I strongly recommend that it’s crucial to do your research and have a plan. To increase your chances of success and to understand the bigger picture, before you write your first line of code, you need to answer a few questions to yourself, for yourself:

• What does it take to be a successful developer?
• What skills do you actually need?
• And how do you set expectations so you can track your progress and make tiny adjustments along the way?

Notice that I’ve mentioned manage expectations. In the coding community that I’ve led for the past decade, I’ve seen tens of people landing hundreds of job offers, becoming successful. And at the same time, I want to be honest with you: I’ve seen about the same amount of people failing, quitting along the way, never truly becoming web developers. I can see for sure that the more experiences I observe, the more the process of becoming a web developer happens. Being a numbers guy, every single time patterns emerge—I can understand what works and what doesn’t, I can draw conclusions, I can see from an above perspective what others can’t see from a personal view, focused only on themselves.

I’ll place myself in your shoes, and I’ll do my best to think of someone with zero experience who wants to start the journey of becoming a successful web developer.You need to and want to do your research—which is something I’ve already done—and I came back with a list of steps for you to better understand what you’re signing up for in the pursuit of becoming a successful web developer. So here is:

The list of steps

Understanding your goal as your first step

My goal, your goal, everybody’s goal isn’t just to learn how to code. You want to become highly capable and confident in building and shipping websites online. And I’m not talking about basic websites you can see on your screen—I’m talking about client-ready websites, which require at least ten times more effort to deliver, in the best-case scenario. You want to place yourself in the top 10% of junior web developers, top 10% of mid web developers, top 10% in the world—junior, mid, or senior web developers. This is where the rewards are the greatest for the effort and impact you can bring to the table. This is your main goal: to position yourself in the top 10% best web developers at your level.

So what does it mean? It means that:

• You want to become capable of creating websites from scratch without following a tutorial
• You want to have a good understanding of how to build client websites and deploy them online, in one or multiple ways
• You want to master the basics of accessibility
• You want to have a good eye for user interfaces and user experience (UX / UI)
• You want to be able to manage expectations, gain experience in working with clients or teams, and always continuously improve
• I’m happy to say, and sorry to say it at the same time, that you always have to research current and new emerging technologies, so you can stay relevant, so you can stay competitive
• You want to keep an eye out on what technologies are most used and bring the most value, so you can bid wisely where to invest your time for the greatest return
• You want and need to discipline yourself so you can avoid common pitfalls like procrastination or chasing perfection
• You need to get rid of the big ego if you have one, or face the consequence of a higher rate of failure

Research is your best friend

Research is what keeps your journey healthy, and it also applies to any company that wants to stay competitive. Through research, you want to cover several key points:

1. How to stay relevant on the market?
   • Technologies are always going up and down in terms of adoption and usage, so you want to keep an eye on which ones are going up in charts and which ones are declining
   • You want to follow experienced web developers and influencers to capitalize on the knowledge they share
   • You want to join online communities such as Discord, X (former Twitter), LinkedIn, and many more so you can take part in real-time discussions
   • And this is the hardest one: you want to find a good mentor who cares about the people and the outcomes they have, cares for them. There are many mentors out there—or better said, many who call themselves mentors—and many who could be really good mentors but don’t want to deal with the enormous stress that comes with it. So finding a good mentor isn’t easy.

2. Understanding who is your competition
   • You want to study job postings for web developers and start to understand what skills companies and clients require. A very good place to find and study jobs is on job boards or LinkedIn
   • You also want to compare yourself with other junior web developers so you can identify gaps and plan ahead on what you can do to take action on filling those gaps
   • And you want to learn how AI is influencing development so you can understand how you can stay ahead

3. Understand technical foundations such as:
   • Hardware, software, and technologies
   • When it comes to hardware, what’s the ideal setup? What budget do you have? And how do you allocate your spending budget wisely?
   • When it comes to software and technologies, we can mention a few:
     • Like HTML, CSS, and JavaScript to start with. You want to add TypeScript to this list as well, but I recommend leaving it for a bit later
     • Astro JS and Vite JS are good libraries to start your projects. NextJS is good too, but it might mess with your head, so I recommend leaving it for later
     • JSON and Markdown, or what I call simple static databases, and you want to master those ones very well before you discover Firebase, MongoDB, or PostgreSQL later
     • You want to introduce yourself to ReactJS, a library that enables you to rapidly build interactive user interfaces
     • And you want to ensure your websites are usable, so build a good understanding of the principles of UI (User Interface) and UX (User Experience)
     • When building websites, fluid typography is cool, and responsive web design (RWD) is a must. I highly recommend practicing and understanding—and making it a daily habit—to build mobile-first websites
     • You want to develop basic NodeJS skills to interact with back-end logic and services
     • Another one would be to do your best to understand the CLI (a.k.a. the console, or command-line interface) and get good at it

4. Your soft skills and personal development
   • The most important skill you want to develop, which is by far more important than coding itself, is to develop your communication skills. You can start by learning how to explain your work clearly
   • The second most important skill you want to develop is confidence, and you can build your confidence by posting your work publicly
   • You also want to understand client relations and improve your CV, your negotiation skills, become a good listener, and learn how to voice your problem-solving abilities
   • The word that glues all of those together is discipline, and to become disciplined, you want to develop strong habits and stay consistent

5. You also want to avoid common pitfalls
   • One of the ways I can figure out if someone is going to fail or succeed as a mentor is when I see people watching lots of tutorials without coding—sometimes without even writing one line of code—versus people who write a lot of code, ask a lot of questions, and try to figure out solutions from watching tutorials
   • Another way you can fail is to isolate yourself and fear asking questions because you might sound inexperienced or dumb. My advice to you is to accept that you’re a beginner, accept that others know you are a beginner, and that the common expectation is that you don’t know much. With this in mind, do your best to research, try to figure out things, and ask questions to your mentor or inside the coding communities you should be part of, as soon as—and no later than—the average time you think it should take for that task
   • You must always avoid delivering perfect solutions when you start as a web developer. You must practice, learn, until it becomes your religion, that done is better than perfect. You want to ship products, solutions, or features fast and iterate based on feedback
   • By far the biggest enemy that will scare you away from becoming a successful web developer—the number one enemy—is copy-paste. This is the worst habit anyone can have
   • You want to cut down time from distractions like excessive gaming, doom-scrolling, or simply wasting hours and hours on passive content. My advice to you is to eliminate them completely. I know it’s hard, and you need to figure out a way that works for you

6. So what are your income opportunities?
   • You put all this time and effort and hope into the future, and you’ll reach that point where you get rewarded. For this, you need to understand the different career paths, such as freelancer, contractor, or employee
   • You also want to discover, test, and understand how to monetize projects for digital products or services you’ll develop
   • And ultimately, what I want and wish for you and everyone like you: I wish you to explore and implement business models that suit your skills, where results are based on merit and not limited like being an employee or contractor

What’s next? Take action is what’s next.

What I want to do—and what you should do as well—is pick one from the list you’ve made yourself or from the list I’ve shared above and start researching. You want to keep notes—it can be digital, or you can use the old pen-and-paper way if that’s your cup of tea—and most importantly, start to practice building real projects along the way.

Your journey starts today!