I want to take a moment to wish you luck! I’ve always believed anyone can program, even if not everyone can program everything. Modern web development can be very profitable, but very overwhelming. It is a constantly-shifting landscape of new standards and practices and tools. It has rebuffed many people due to this, who often become dejected by its complexity and dynamism.
If this is not you, then that’s excellent! However, if you feel this way, you should know that a different, slower, more stable version of web development still exists, which more closely mirrors conventional software development and even the shell scripting you have experience with: older style monolithic web applications are everywhere, and more continue to appear. Written in PHP, C#, ASP, even Perl (old!), these older web applications tend to have fairly stable ecosystems and documentation. You rarely find the biggest industry names like Microsoft and Apple and Netflix touting its engineers as having expert level knowledge in these languages and ecosystems, because they’re seen as somewhat old-hat, but they have a massive industry presence nonetheless… and fewer and fewer competent programmers exist to maintain and improve these systems.
Facebook is still largely comprised of PHP code, I believe - though they use a different runtime. WordPress is still a staggeringly massive presence on the Internet for anything from business sites to e-commerce shops, and it has a huge (and profitable, if you find a niche!) ecosystem of plug-ins written in PHP and Javascript/CSS/HTML. The new fediverse software (kbin) I am writing this post on is written in PHP! It is still easily possible to make a comfortable living doing nothing but quality PHP, especially if you can find a nice niche. It has a (relatively) undeserved bad reputation amongst modern programmers.
I want to take a moment to wish you luck! I’ve always believed anyone can program, even if not everyone can program everything. Modern web development can be very profitable, but very overwhelming. It is a constantly-shifting landscape of new standards and practices and tools. It has rebuffed many people due to this, who often become dejected by its complexity and dynamism.
If this is not you, then that’s excellent! However, if you feel this way, you should know that a different, slower, more stable version of web development still exists, which more closely mirrors conventional software development and even the shell scripting you have experience with: older style monolithic web applications are everywhere, and more continue to appear. Written in PHP, C#, ASP, even Perl (old!), these older web applications tend to have fairly stable ecosystems and documentation. You rarely find the biggest industry names like Microsoft and Apple and Netflix touting its engineers as having expert level knowledge in these languages and ecosystems, because they’re seen as somewhat old-hat, but they have a massive industry presence nonetheless… and fewer and fewer competent programmers exist to maintain and improve these systems.
Facebook is still largely comprised of PHP code, I believe - though they use a different runtime. WordPress is still a staggeringly massive presence on the Internet for anything from business sites to e-commerce shops, and it has a huge (and profitable, if you find a niche!) ecosystem of plug-ins written in PHP and Javascript/CSS/HTML. The new fediverse software (kbin) I am writing this post on is written in PHP! It is still easily possible to make a comfortable living doing nothing but quality PHP, especially if you can find a nice niche. It has a (relatively) undeserved bad reputation amongst modern programmers.
Anyway, thought to mention this. Good luck!