An Illustrated Roadmap to Product Development

As a growing technology company, it has been our constant endeavour to help young students and coding enthusiasts to understand the changing dynamics of technology and product development.

Our college education system teaches little out of the box, and the many, many sources of information on the internet make it hard to decide where to get started. 

In an effort to address this challenge, we have tried to put together a detailed background and the current technology scenario in the product development domain using an illustrated roadmap. It might seem overwhelming at first but stay with us till the end. We don’t expect you to finish reading or grasping everything in a single go, but it’s an effort to bring everything relevant under a single blog post.

Wherever you are in your programming journey, whatever you know or you do not, just use these maps to help guide your learnings.

Getting Started

The beginning is the most important part of any journey. Choose a path which fascinates you as a developer (Front-end, Back-end, etc.). 
If you know your strengths and interests. Great!

And, if you are not sure, no worries! To understand which path to choose, you first need to understand what they mean.

Think of it like this: If you haven’t been to a beach, or a mountain ever in your life, how can you decide whether you are a beach-person or a mountain-person? In that case, take a look at both the paths, learn both of them (yes, being really ambitious), review them and then decide what fascinates you.

Independent of your path, make sure you go through the recommended yellow highlighted boxes (on the left) and use them as your base to dive deeper into your learning…

Getting Started: Resources

1. GitHub – Hello World
   This is the GitHub official guide to getting started with Github!
2. SSH Protocol (also referred as Secure Shell)
   This is the official Secure Shell website (includes basics). 
3. HTTP/ HTTPS
4. Understanding and using Rest APIs
   Quick and easy to understand summary on Rest APIs and their structure.
5. Terminal Usage – Basic Mac OS and Basic Windows OS
   
6. Data Structures and Algorithms
   

The Front-end Path

The first step is to learn the basics of HTML, CSS and Javascript. Then dive deeper into each one of them. Speed up your learning after you are done with the yellow boxes (Remember: yellow is the colour to look for).

Gosh! That was soooo long…
If you are still here, pat your back!

Front-end: Helpful Resources

1. Angular
   Official website of angular (includes development guides).
2. JavaScript
   Getting started with Javascript community (includes examples and resources).
3. Bootstrap
   Official getting started documentation by the Bootstrap community.
4. Next.js
   Official Next.js blog to getting started with the framework.
5. TypeScript
   Official five minute tutorial of getting started with Typescript.
6. Rx.js
   Official introductory documentation by RX.js.
   

The Back-end Path

I know this is scary! But the only way through this is ‘through’ it. Take help from the yellow boxes.

Congratulations on surviving Tsunami #2.

Back-end: Helpful Resources

1. Golang
   The official tour of the Go programming language.
   
2. .NET
   Microsoft documentation on getting started with the technology.
3. OAuth
   Official getting started with the technology by OAuth community.
   
4. MongoDB
   Official MongoDB tutorial on getting started.
   
5. Docker
   Getting started with docker orientation and setup.
   
6. Domain Driven Design (DDD)

This awesome roadmap to becoming a web developer has been created by Kamranahmedse and posted to GitHub under the CC-BY 4.0 License.

Closing Note

Pro tip: Don’t rush! Let’s accept the fact that there’s a lot to do and it can’t be done in a single day. Persistence is the key here. Approach things in small chunks and do it regularly. Go slow to go fast!

How will I remember all of this? 
You can’t! I would advise you to take a print-out of your preferred path, paste it somewhere you will see it every single day.

Plan your days, make a timeline, set the yellow boxes as your milestones and make it the ONE THING that you do every day!

Yes, it will take a lot of hardships, but you’ll come out of it smarter and stronger. Trust me, it will be worth the effort. Concluding it with one of my favourite quotes from the Alice in Wonderland.

You know what the issue is with this world?
Everyone wants a magical solution to their problems, and everyone refuses to believe in magic.

Therefore believe in the magic in YOU!

For those of you who are still with me, I really appreciate your willingness to learn and grow.  Thank you for your time and reading it till the end. We would love to hear back from you. Tell us what you like the most and ways in which we, together, can improve the learning curve of our young developers.