Self Taught Full Stack Developer?

tldr; Learning to code as a hobby, any tips?

Doable?

Which stack? IDK

I'll explain: (Please excuse my ignorance)

I had a random notion to pursue this. Honestly, I was curious as to what it takes to create something like Torn as well as other things. The further I look down this path, the more my interest seems to grow. I went to trade school (16 years ago) and graduation from the computer networking program where the material was mostly A+ and Network+ stuff but have not truly kept up with that education since.
I don't want to pay a large tuition or have a class schedule, trying to do this as low cost as possible and in what little free time I have.

At the moment I am currently studying/learning HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. My path after that is unclear at the moment, I would like to be more comfortable with those languages before I make any plans. I am doing this is my spare time, and have no plans to use the skillset to leave my current job which is unrelated to the field. I realize this is neither a quick or easy goal.

I'll ask for your input, but before I do, I will list some of the things I am currently doing/using to further my education.

• Pretty much every free markup and coding course I can find; freeCodeCamp.org, Codecademy, W3Schools.
• I paid $15 for a batch of video lectures on Web Development on Udemy.
• I discovered Traversy Media on Youtube and find the tutorials extremely helpful and easy to understand.
• Bookmarked W3Schools and the MDN for quick reference.
• Created a Github and Gitlab account. I have a basic understanding of what Github is about, but have not begun to use it for anything. I don't know much about Git either.
• I am currently using Windows Notepad to write/practice/experiment with markup. I have installed Notepad++ and Visual Studio Code although have not tried to use VSC yet.
• I use Google Chrome exclusively as a browser and I am aware of its developer tools although have not explored them much myself.
• I use Windows 10 exclusively for my operating system atm but I have a feeling that it would be a good idea to refamiliarize myself with Linux. (thick cobwebs in that area)
• As of right now I am unfamiliar with any frameworks.

I realize I am in the very beginning of this journey, but is there anything I should look out for? Change? am I flat wrong on anything?

Do you have an resources/tools you would suggest? Tips/Tricks/Warnings?

edit:tldr

I taught myself how to use the MERN stack over the past year, building off of existing knowledge of JS and HTML and now have a job doing it, it's not impossible!

I would recommend you start using VSCode as soon as possible because notepad won't help you at all given the lack of intellisense, or anything really. I would recommend getting to grips with CLI as well to make your life a little easier.

Stack is down to preference, if you're going down the route of Web Development I personally (re: very biased) would vouch for the MERN stack which is MongoDB, Express, React and Node. This is stuff for the future though, for now do your HTML/CSS/JS tutorials and get comfortable. Then the decision of what you do next becomes your's - when I was learning I wanted to learn backend stuff first so I could integrate it with the HTML pages I was building so I learned node first and made discord bots, then express and mongo so I could start building RESTful APIs. Once I'd gotten comfortable with that I moved on to React which I found easier since it's not that syntactically different to everything else I'd learned by then.

Above all, have fun while you're doing it and learn to own your mistakes! There will be lots, and every single one of them can be an opportunity to learn and improve. Try to build things that interest you as well! Got a busy work week? Build a calendar system or to-do list system. Been crushing it on a particular game online recently? See if they have an API you can interface with. The point is that you should enjoy yourself while you're developing things and learning because it will seem a whole lot less like hard work.

Remember though: everyone's experience is different! There's not really an exclusively right or wrong path to go down as long as you learn good practices.

I hope this was insightful for you, feel free to PM me if you want to know anything else!

Thank you for the thoughtful response. It was incredibly insightful.

I am going to boot up VSCode tonight and start playing around. I will emphasize CLI and give it is own spot early on in my self made syllabus.

The MERN or MEAN stack is what initially jumped out at me, but I am unsure if I know enough yet to really know why.

I completely understand that drive to start learning backend stuff, I find myself constantly wondering how the front end stuff I am learning works with a back end.

I know only a basic amount about programming in general but I have been attempting to learn css in a free mobile app called sololearn it problly not the best but it goes over a topic then quizes you about said topic. Hope this helps

Yes, it is possible, but unless you set yourself solid goals, I don't think you'll stay motivated to keep progressing. Personally, the only reason I became a full-stack developer was to resurrect a web game that wasn't being supported any more, so that the community of players had somewhere to hang out.

We decided to go with a standard Apache/MySQL/PHP setup with HTML/JS/JQuery, and while it looked good at first, we realised about a year in that we would have much preferred to go with Python instead of PHP, because PHP's object orientation is idiosyncratic (if not broken).

I use NetBeans as my IDE, and it's been perfectly fine.

I would recommend Node.js or Python with Flask as a backend for web development. For the frontend, I'd say do React or Angular. If you do Node.js then the whole stack can be JavaScript. Or TypeScript, which I'd recommend you learn.

For editor, I strongly recommend VS Code

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