On: Evolution of a Web Developer: From PHP Newbie To P...

[n00shie]

This is really good stuff. The roadmap from beginner to expert is generally consistent irregardless of the language or framework.

I always hoped for a "knowledge map" for programming (example: http://www.khanacademy.org/exercisedashboard) that clearly shows knowledge dependancies.

Can this be a step towards developing a comprehensive, collaborative knowledge map which would benefit programmers of all levels?

[Zarel → n00shie]

It's interesting. Reading through the list, it was a lot of "things I learned a long time ago" interspersed with "things I learned fairly recently".

Having started doing web development before Django and jQuery were released, I definitely learned about JavaScript debuggers, POST requests, CAPTCHAs, AJAX (which, by the way, was positively painful before the invention of JSON), XHTML and the validation thereof, fake CAPTCHAs, cookies, passing session IDs in GET requests for people who block cookies, returning dynamically-generated images to an HTTP request... long before I ever learned about web frameworks, ORM, or any of those things.

[dshah → n00shie]

You're giving the article way too much credit (I'm the writer).

But, I think the notion of creating a Khan Academy style map for web development would be really cool.

[n00shie → dshah]

Ha, well I was giving credit to where it's due. As a novice coder I find myself always wondering about the bigger picture, and so I can always derive value from a step-by-step process of how someone more experienced than myself has achieved their current status.