There is too much to learn

The World Wide Web has always been a messy place. A lot of people from all over the world are simultaneously contributing to it. That is, why it gets messier every day. It is, in its entirety, kind of the biggest software project on the planet. And we all know, how easy it is to mess up big software projects.

Over the last 30 years, a lot of technologies have been created. There are so many programming languages, tools, frameworks, and libraries out there, it is hard to keep track of them all. And the variety gets bigger day by day.

Every now and then a new shiny thing™ arises. People will talk about it and will recommend it to you. If you are a beginner in web development, please do not listen to them. You should not invest time in the new shiny thing™. Instead, you should learn the basics. Because the basics will outlive the new shiny thing™.

What not to learn first

Gatsby, Hugo, or Jekyll will someday help you build static websites, but first, learn the basics.

Block-Element-Modifier (BEM), Sass, or Tailwind CSS will someday help you organize your CSS, but first, learn the basics.

React, Vue.js, or Angular will someday help you build awesome user interfaces, but first, learn the basics.

MySQL, PostgreSQL, or MongoDB will someday help you store data in a database, but first, learn the basics.

Ruby on Rails, Laravel, Django, or another Model-View-Controller (MVC) framework will someday help you build feature-rich backends, but first, learn the basics.

Docker, Docker Compose, or Kubernetes will someday help you build and host websites, but first, learn the basics.

What to learn first

As I said before: Start with the basics. I recommend building a ton of websites just using basic technologies. Maybe ten websites are enough to learn the basics, maybe you will need 50. It does not really matter, you just have to get started and keep going.

There will be a day, where you understand enough about HTTP, URL, HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Then and only then you can carefully start adding more technologies to the stack.

If you want to learn the basics, I can recommend following the developer roadmaps at roadmaps.sh.