What web development niche should I cultivate?

Most of the hot development work is in mobile these days. Maybe you could work on learning that.

This is one of those tough questions with many answers. Right now, you have a lot to learn, so there are many directions you could take and it would be ok. One thing that comes to mind is that whatever direction you go here, you’re likely going to have to be dealing with one or more flavor of a javascript framework, like Angular. Get familiar with Git (source control), SQL, HTML, and CSS. None of these skills will go to waste. But you’ll likely want to look into PHP, Ruby, etc. It sounds like you’re already looking at PHP. But even if you decide to go mobile, hybrid apps are getting some attention, so again you’d be dealing with javascript. If you end up interested in non-hybrid native mobile apps, you’d have to choose between doing separate Android and iOS development, or use Xamarin ($$) to maximize shared code and be able to work in VS (and use a single language, such as C#).

I’m a software engineer at a company that develops using the Microsoft stack. We’re C#, .NET, MVC, WebAPI, Angular, SQL Server, and Xamarin (for Android and iOS app development). But there is huge buy-in ($) on much of this. So for small development projects it often makes sense to go with a different technology.

I don’t think you could pay me enough to dig through the mishmash of crap they have going on and I have been doing this shit for 20 years. It sounds like they just bolted a bunch of shit together and it managed to work.

If everything is fast and technically works on the backend I would focus on just making it prettier and more modern in appearance. So that is pretty much going to be HTML, CSS, Javascript, and possibly some PHP or whatever server-side language they are using.

Wordpress is going to use MySQL as a database and PHP pulls info from that database. PHP then mixes it in with HTML and CSS and Javascript and then it gets sent to the browser.

Here is what it looks like when you mix PHP with HTML output. http://i.imgur.com/WXxPWDY.png <—All the database shit is inside those function so you can’t see it. And that is from Wordpress. It is the code for the sidebar.

If I was you I would just by a book. Anything like Database driven websites with PHP will be a hell of a lot faster than piecing it together from tutorials on the internet.

And seriously.. This is something you have to always ask yourself. “Do I know enough to properly secure this enough to not leak user/pass/email/creditcards?” You don’t. So think very carefully about doing anything with customer data. It isn’t easy.