Anyone here working in the web development field

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M.A.94

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After doing a 4 years undergrad degree in networking, followed up by a 1 year masters degree (ending next month) in programme development. I have found that out of all the modules I have been taught I'm most interested in web design or back end server maintenance typically using linux, this is stuff like lamp server, DNS name server, active directory server development and maintenance.

Was just wondering if there is anyone in this field already on the forum, who could point me towards organisations ideally in the north east.

It seems that experience out weights qualifications in the eyes of an employer, but how do I get that initial experience :dk:
 
I'm going to be brutally honest here...
First of all you need to decide whether it is web design or 'techy' stuff.
Web design needs someone who has artistic flair - the technical aspect doesn't come into it. If that is your forte, that's fine, but it is a crowded market, and there are some very talented people who create great looking websites on Wordpress/Lightsail. I can't see a huge career in this, unless of course you get lucky.
Regarding the techy stuff - it honestly feels like your course was (at least) five years out of date. While everything you have said is essential, it doesn't reflect where the market is today.
LAMP servers are old hat. I can fire up an ec2 lamp instance in seconds. Config then takes a few minutes. I've given a full overview of DNS to non techy people in half an hour - to the point where they all get it. Server maintenance is a thing of the past - I have auto scaling groups where I can just kill a running instance and within seconds (well a minute) the group is back at capacity. In fact the current trend is to create instances without port 22 access. Unheard of just a few years ago!.

On the positive side there are LOTS of opportunities in the IT world - for the techies, there is infrastructure as code - using tools like Cloudformation and Ansible. Others growing areas are security and Business Information 'Tell me what I don't know'.
If you want to stay on the techy side, the current trend is DEvOps, and you could make a good start in your career there - lots of innovative stuff with cloud computing and infrastructure as code. My preference is AWS, but obviously there are others - you can soon be designing systems with zero downtime. Currently I have systems that do a security update, back themselves up, then terminate. The ASG then fires up new updated instances according to demand - simple but a huge advace in where we were even five years ago.
Security is where I think the real way forward is. Lots of opportunities there, but possibly stressful and getting the business on side can be difficult.
Or Business Information - again this seems to be getting big, and I do think it has legs. Businesses are very much looking at every aspect of how they run - costs/customer feedback, areas where they are doing well/not so well. It doesn't sound much but it covers both techy and arty areas and means you will be very much into every area of the business.

You won't ever get bored. Today I'm migrating around 800 disparate connections/workflows into our systems that were set up on insecure (http) links and IP addresses to use URLs ans https - I need to ensure that the systems they connect to can accept https connections (and not all can) and that they can respond to the call on a url rather than an IP. Looks simple, and it isn't rocket science, but there is plenty to go wrong.

As to what areas you can get into, I'm guessing that you are at uni and fairly young. If that is the case there will be plenty of dynamic people with great ideas looking to start up businesses. They will be looking for people with a wide range of skills who are looking to further their knowledge.
The pay won't be great at the start, but that means that you can change if you aren't happy with the direction, or performance of the business - and who knows? they may just hit it off.

Good luck and let me know if you have any questions.
 
Making a choice between Web design and techy stuff is old thinking. With DevOps being the prevailing methodology these days organisations are looking at multifunctional teams who understand UX and front ends and can also build the back end and undertake A2B testing.

DXC Technology has its Digital Transformation Centre on the Silverlink in Newcastle and this is exactly what they do.
 
I'm going to be brutally honest here...
First of all you need to decide whether it is web design or 'techy' stuff.
Web design needs someone who has artistic flair - the technical aspect doesn't come into it. If that is your forte, that's fine, but it is a crowded market, and there are some very talented people who create great looking websites on Wordpress/Lightsail. I can't see a huge career in this, unless of course you get lucky.
Regarding the techy stuff - it honestly feels like your course was (at least) five years out of date. While everything you have said is essential, it doesn't reflect where the market is today.
LAMP servers are old hat. I can fire up an ec2 lamp instance in seconds. Config then takes a few minutes. I've given a full overview of DNS to non techy people in half an hour - to the point where they all get it. Server maintenance is a thing of the past - I have auto scaling groups where I can just kill a running instance and within seconds (well a minute) the group is back at capacity. In fact the current trend is to create instances without port 22 access. Unheard of just a few years ago!.

On the positive side there are LOTS of opportunities in the IT world - for the techies, there is infrastructure as code - using tools like Cloudformation and Ansible. Others growing areas are security and Business Information 'Tell me what I don't know'.
If you want to stay on the techy side, the current trend is DEvOps, and you could make a good start in your career there - lots of innovative stuff with cloud computing and infrastructure as code. My preference is AWS, but obviously there are others - you can soon be designing systems with zero downtime. Currently I have systems that do a security update, back themselves up, then terminate. The ASG then fires up new updated instances according to demand - simple but a huge advace in where we were even five years ago.
Security is where I think the real way forward is. Lots of opportunities there, but possibly stressful and getting the business on side can be difficult.
Or Business Information - again this seems to be getting big, and I do think it has legs. Businesses are very much looking at every aspect of how they run - costs/customer feedback, areas where they are doing well/not so well. It doesn't sound much but it covers both techy and arty areas and means you will be very much into every area of the business.

You won't ever get bored. Today I'm migrating around 800 disparate connections/workflows into our systems that were set up on insecure (http) links and IP addresses to use URLs ans https - I need to ensure that the systems they connect to can accept https connections (and not all can) and that they can respond to the call on a url rather than an IP. Looks simple, and it isn't rocket science, but there is plenty to go wrong.

As to what areas you can get into, I'm guessing that you are at uni and fairly young. If that is the case there will be plenty of dynamic people with great ideas looking to start up businesses. They will be looking for people with a wide range of skills who are looking to further their knowledge.
The pay won't be great at the start, but that means that you can change if you aren't happy with the direction, or performance of the business - and who knows? they may just hit it off.

Good luck and let me know if you have any questions.


Thank you so much. I'm 24 just finishing of my masters degree so at the start of my career. This was a very helpful response! I'm just trying to figure out which direction I want to go, I don't want to go into a field to then figure out it's not what i want to do
 
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Thank you so much. I'm 24 just finishing of my masters degree so at the start of my career. This was a very helpful response! I'm just trying to figure out which direction I want to go, I don't want to go into a field to then figure out it's not what i want to do
Ted has given some great advice there.

I wouldn't worry so much about the field, I would just try to find the right opportunity as what you really need now is current real world experience to complement your qualifications. Like Ted, if I was to start a career in security today, it would definitely be in information security.
 
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In fact the current trend is to create instances without port 22 access. Unheard of just a few years ago!.

Just curious about this one as I always change the standard 22 to a custom port and explicitly define which user(s) can have access.

Is this due to VM's default settings with Amazon? And aren't the servers behind some sort of configurable firewall?

Only interested from a traditional perspective as I run, host and maintain my own physical/virtual servers. The concept of cloud has always been weird to me :)
 
To add to the above, I'd stay in networks if I were you. I see too many software techies these days without any real knowledge of how computers and networks operate which in my opinion is crucial as it makes you a much better specialist especially when it comes to troubleshooting and problem solving. Someone still needs to build and maintain the infrastructure behind those fancy interfaces where everything is pretty buttons and three horizontal lines in the corner. If you're not already, start tinkering with Unix-like stuff in your free time. Put a Windows domain in a local small business that has 10 users and no idea where to store data or what an offsite backup is (and keep them away from dropbox and cloud for as long as you could). There are tons of opportunities out there to learn, practice and get much required experience, you just need to make a start.
 
Just curious about this one as I always change the standard 22 to a custom port and explicitly define which user(s) can have access.

Is this due to VM's default settings with Amazon? And aren't the servers behind some sort of configurable firewall?

Only interested from a traditional perspective as I run, host and maintain my own physical/virtual servers. The concept of cloud has always been weird to me :)

Hi Alex, this is less about security - (ssh with ssl keys and a simple passcode is pretty secure) it is more about infrastructure as code and disposable infrastructure. Rather than logging onto a server and making changes, they can be made out of the server environment as code and tested.
This is a repeatable process - remember that you may have multiple and variable numbers of ec2 instances according to demand. Once the code has been changed and tested it can be pushed out to the staging/live environment - you don't have to go onto every server and make those changes.

As with any unix/linux environment there is a local firewall, and AWS also gives you extra protection with security zones and control over VPC entry/exit traffic. This makes it so secure that I am running a VPC with only the local firewalls as I don't need anything clever. There are of course virtual firewalls also - we are in the process of rolling out next gen Palo Alto firewalls which give additional benefits of threat detection/alerting, attachment scanning etc.
"The concept of cloud has always been weird to me :)" Once you get your head around the concepts (and it took me a while - I was the one who started taking our services into the cloud around four years ago, - disposable instances, dynamic server IPs - both private and public, scaling in and out of instances etc all seem strange at first, but the change is revolutionary and inevitable. It really is exciting to see what can be done and some of the ideas and concepts that people have.
 
You’re right experience is what counts. In interviews, they want to know where you worked last and what you were doing, not what and where you studied.

Although with no experience, having completed formal education in the field will certainly help.

I’m ten years into my programming, devops career, and I didn’t even finish school, let alone go onto further education. This only mattered in my very first interviews, where I had to demonstrate my abilities with real world examples of my work both freelance and for open source projects. Once I had my foot in the door, and now working for a large notable organisation, it’s no longer a barrier, and it wouldn’t even come up in an interview.

While 400ixl is right that organisations want cross functional teams, in my experience, that includes skills for front and backend development, deployment, “linuxy stuff”, provisioning cloud infrastructure and database proficiency. The design team is normally separate and there’s not a great deal of overlap in our skill sets.
 
Ted has given some great advice there.

I wouldn't worry so much about the field, I would just try to find the right opportunity as what you really need now is current real world experience to complement your qualifications. Like Ted, if I was to start a career in security today, it would definitely be in information security.

Let me correct my own typo: Like Ted, if I was to start a career in IT today, it would definitely be in information security.
 
Yes - and I meant Business Intelligence, not Business Information.
Perils of typing before the first coffee :p:p:D:D
 
I wouldn't be looking to get into infrastructure these days. It is all going software designed and commodity. So unless you plan to work for the likes of Amazon, Microsoft, Google etc who will own this space then it is going to be an ever shrinking role.

Information Security and Analytics / Machine Learning / AI are two growing field of speciality. Build those into your mutli skilled disciplines and you will be a sought after resource.

Trend is also these days that the younger generations do not go and work for organisations for long periods of time. it is almost on a project by project basis (12-18 months) where they either have the skills already or where they have some but there are others to be learnt as part of that multi skilled team. If I was starting out, then these are the environments I would be working in, not legacy enterprise type environments which are just legacy and will not be healthy for the career of someone starting out.
 
It seems that experience out weights qualifications in the eyes of an employer, but how do I get that initial experience

I find putting a working web demo in front of a client or for that matter employer, speaks volumes.

Notwithstanding the advice offered by others here, if you want experience but aren't being offered jobs which will get you that experience, then roll your sleeves up and get yourself a demo environment. Digital Ocean offer droplets from $5 a month (raw and pre-configured) and you can front these with a free Cloudflare account, where you can use their DNS etc, to play around with the various settings, cname flattening etc.

You might also want to look at Azure from Microsoft. It's a proprietary stack of tools ranging from VMs, to pipelining and events. There's not much you can't do there, but it's not free. Although they offer a 30 day $200 credit trial account. Useful if nothing else, for practical, end to end, process experience.

There's also this from another thread which you might find useful.

Dev
MS Azure - dev, pipelining, events, VM
Digital Ocean - VM, Blob, Load Balance, Firewall 2 + 3
Cloudflare - Edge, DNS, Crypto, Cache, -DDOS, Firewall 1
WP Engine - Application delivery, staging
Backupsheep - Digital Ocean auto backup

Sales, Presentation & Admin (O365)
Exchange - email and retention and client interface for Dynamics
SharePoint - general structured storage, retention, Client presentations (see comp analysis above)
Dynamics - CRM, Leads, quotes, invoices, social engagement (SE can be programmed to trawl social networks for keywords, for example client brands and report back on client sentiment. This is how many orgs keep track and respond to negative sentiment in Twitter, Public FB etc.
Power BI - Analytics interface. Brilliant for assembling, aggregating and analysing data from, for example, Azure, Dynamics, SharePoint, Google Analytics, DBs and can also read from Xero etc.
Google Docs - web embeddable docs

That's most of the stack, although we earn our money from custom solutions, utilising the above.
 
Get yourself a portfolio in github which you can give prospective employers access to. Even simple things like your CV in there as an MD file can make an impression.
 
heck just read through all that now my head hurts
 

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