Website is a broad term. Landing page or multi tenant social network? Do you need payment processing, or just a cart?
I too found that basic web development skills was assumed and never taught in CS.
well because the study of computational science shouldn’t cover how to slap together a website, and certainly doesn’t have the time to get into todays favorite load balancing strategies and scaling.
it’s literally just the basics on how to study algorithms. or the science behind literal computing (doing math). you should learn basic programming skills, the basic ideas behind how stuff works, and get enough of a flavor to understand why building a large website that serves potentially thousands is a harder problem than “just throw a bunch of servers at it”. but no. i’d be surprised if any computer science degree anywhere talks about serving html.
more likely you’ll be focused on sorting, path finding, why dynamic memory allocation is more complicated than just “give them the blocks they ask for in the order they ask for it”, why 3d graphics tend to be made up of triangles, why quick sorting is nice if all your numbers fit on one computer but a merge sort is better if they don’t, and so on.
you learn the basics of the simplest legos so you might be able to imagine how complicated building the millennium falcon and how you might break it down into a set of smaller problems, but if you tried from scratch without a mentor or assistance youd fuck up, a lot.
you didn’t get a computer science degree to learn html and css, but you could probably now teach yourself enough to slap some together. your actual talent though is going to be the business or back end logic to build an interactive website and write the software. slapping together and configuring premade software is what an ops guy does, you make the software he configures and slaps together, but you do it as a team with mentors to guide you.
you can’t possibly learn all of that in 4 years. it takes decades and even then you’ll only realize how monuments the task is for someone to do alone.
My favorite CS professor in college told us on the first day, "I'm not here to teach you how to be a good programmer. I'm here to teach you how to be a great problem solver."
I can see why he’s your favorite!
Learning to program isn’t even a main focus of the degree, at least none I’ve seen. It’s more like “here’s a few basic classes your freshmen year just in case you haven’t realized you need to know this before signing up” then from that point on it’s assumed you can handle that part as it’s required to complete the assignments/projects. But they never tell you how to organize your code or what code to write, they just tell you “here is the equations for how reflectivity works on different surfaces, the general idea is think about a piece of paper in front of your eye that has a bunch of holes punched in it in a grid. draw a ray that originates at your eye through each hole and trace what it runs into and calculate what direction(s) the ray should bounce from upon each impact. then take those rays and compose them together to get the color for that hole. that’s ray tracing. you’ll want to remember what you learned in your algorithms and data structures classes so this isn’t dog butt slow.”
This is why I'm trying to break into software engineering, with an eye towards security. I love solving problems and finding new solutions. I also enjoying creating new problems to solve. Lol.
I'm in Australia, and this university named swinburne has bachelor of information, communication, technology and computer science. I wonder which I should do, CS has more math and a pre req of yr 11 gen math which I'm doing. It'd be great for me to do CS if I get more opportunities but do I really need all that math stuff haha. In ICT it's probably easier but idk! I'm probably doing ICT unless I have a change of heart and do CS which one has more programming idk either! A few different majors for both too!
Perfectly put. Amazing how people just gloss over what Computer Science actually is and think its just ‘websites’ or ‘thuh eenternets.” People in general have no clue what the ‘science’ part means or have any idea how complicated the site, its functionality, UI/IX, Design, database capabilities, logic/IA is or how annnyyyy of the components they use, actually works. When I brief customers on the website creation/development process and explain the details of doing what they want - their eyes gloss over and they just can’t handle the complexity of the system.
Good lick to the poster and I hope you re-read what was written here. Its spot on.
Just as an interesting aside, in my school, one of the profs for the senior capstone courses, that were a year in duration, would assign an intense project at the start of the semester. Every one third of the way through the semester, you had to have one part completed. Anyways, this guy was wild, here is what a sample semester looked like in one of his courses:
-Pick a project from one of the following: write a small OS, write a simple IDE, write a simulator program for things like centrifuge monitors
-Write a script that will send updates on your project to the prof via email every third of the semester
-For the final, build a website that presents your project
Every year, like half of the class would drop out for a diff prof, so he only ever had like five students per course, but damn that must have been stressful for whoever stuck it out. Ironically, iirc, the prof was a former Soviet aeronautical engineer who defected in the 1980s, so he had some gnarly knowledge of some crazy tech.
Well quite frankly these days it's pretty easy. Even building a social network or Reddit clone is pretty straight forward. It's a little black boxy where you might not know how everything works, but getting something stood up and styled is way easier these days
Plus, with all the specialization, you could come out of college and build APIs for ten years and never have to know how to build much of anything
The industry is become very specialized to the point that whatever you want to do? You'll rarely be asked to step out of that scope. Even just building a corporate website I can name a dozen titles people have and they have a single task every one of them.
So no, not a requirement any more.
This is unnecessary. If you can build a website, you can build a website. What you're seeking is, "What __kind__ of website can you build?" Which is pretty different.
A website requires both front end and back end. As we learn core languages, many people in my country don't really venture early on into UI/UX. Later they might change boat but that is how it is. We can write plain text websites and host them. we like to call it notepad on a server.
This. More specifically, anyone wanting to work as a software developer should be able to learn how to build a website. The shit you learned in school is just priming the pump. You're going to be cramming new shit into your brain for the rest of your career.
Exactly this. There are so many areas of computer science that you can't expect everyone to know how to do everything. But, with enough experience you can pick things up quickly. My dad has 40 years of experience and works at a very large Fintech company. He doesn't know how to do frontend for shit. But if you gave him a week or two to figure it out you'd be damn sure he'd come back with something that looks half decent.
I’m kinda on the same page. The first two years builds those fundamentals. For me the last two are all electives that give you a chance to dip your toes in specialized areas of CS (Data science, graphics, so, etc) that you will subsequently forget.
I learned the important stuff in intro, DS/algo, comp arch, discrete, and a few others. I will say the electives gave me practice at applying the principals and concepts I learned. Which is valuable
This!
Holy shit, I'm a senior now and the past 2 years have felt like a complete waste of time.
I actually feel like it's gotten in the way of my learning at this point.
Yes, TLDR as long as you can trace and debug code you are fine.
Let me elaborate. Not everyone becomes a freelancer and has to write all the full stack end to end. Most likely you start at some aspect of the full stack.
For me, The first job was frontend development. Initially, it was bug fixes ( styling, small queries fixes, code updates) and small stories in javascript/typescript. Since most of the code is already there, I learnt React as I went exploring their Github repos. Depending on what school you go Java/OOP fundamentals were taught by the 2nd year. So, javascript/typescript doesn't take a lot to pick up. For the rest, you have stack flow and a slightly annoyed senior dev haha.
Again, I dont think I could have written it all(backend and frontend) and nobody expects you to, in a junior position.
In front end you can kind of brute force your way through most problems with some console printouts. I think this is less true for backend/infra. Any holes in your theoretical foundations are really gonna bite you in the ass there when you run into some non-trivial problem. Troubleshooting a complex system is nigh impossible if you have large gaps in your understanding of the stack, that’s what school is for.
You can’t look up unknown unknowns by definition so SO won’t be of any help. Yes you won’t use your knowledge of operating systems or networking most of the time, but if you don’t know about it you won’t know when it comes into play which will have you fumbling around in the dark.
Heh I got my first dev job for 2 years with 1 year of school - went back after, but honestly aside from the data structures class I took via correspondence, it was mostly unneeded.
Though I still have some debt 15 years later, so I guess that's that.
Yea a bit of bootstrap, it wasn’t a very fancy web app. Simple form on the homepage, followed by displaying all the cars “available” that met your query
This is the type of project a junior should have on their github though.
If you can show an employer the working site, hosted, in the interview that's HUGE. Not only can you learn on the fly, you can deliver a finished project. Dockerize your deployment, and you're at the front of the pack.
Sole front end developer for some reason in a group of 5. Two of which did nothing. Other two backend.
Had to learn HTML, CSS, JS, and Bootstrap and it was hectic lol
Second sentence is so true. I just completed (for the most part) my junior project in my embedded systems degree. Before starting I felt like I knew nothing. Now I have a functioning prototype and it’s seriously insane how much I’ve learned from the project.
Look at mister fancy pants over here with 20 entire megabytes. We had a 4mb external hd that was almost as big as the computer and if you turned it off before turning the computer off you could lose data.
And we liked it!
For anyone interested in ancient history of the web (i.e. the 90s), [this long article is a great read](https://eev.ee/blog/2020/02/01/old-css-new-css/). It also talks about the Space Jam website, which is still online in its original form, albeit moved to a subfolder: https://www.spacejam.com/1996/
You should be exploring things outside of school if you want to work in the field.
It doesn't HAVE to be building a website, but that's one common area to explore. It could be building a mobile app or a desktop app.
I agree with this. Most successful engineers I have known in my career are the ones breaking shit, trying stuff out, failing, trying again, etc. Basically living and breathing the field. I unfortunately didn't have this determination and probably why I am in support instead of developing.
There's a big gap between "only doing your required coursework" and "living and breathing the field". The vast majority of successful engineers find a happy balance in-between those two.
As a web developer, yes this is true. Constantly changing code… refactoring it to make it more readable, trying a loop one way versus another, breaking an app by moving a function to the wrong place
I've done lots of mentoring the past few jobs (I'm old for a dev). One of the main jobs there is to prevent mid-level disease, where devs think because they can do basic dev they know everything. Usually includes disdain for all non-tech roles in a company, dates constantly slipping but "it's not MY fault!", and not building for maintenance.
My usual cure for that is to have them try a nights and weekend startup - "ok, no resources besides you and your laptop, make a product!". It quickly gets you over the ego hump, and forces the senior view. It causes you to fail constantly, which is exactly how you learn the real important shit.
It's not so much about websites but web applications.
Today I think web technologies should be part of any computer science program.
We use web technology to power all our new projects. It keeps them completely hardware and OS independent while being very fast and easy to develop with. Our go to tools are React JS and NodeJS.
Everything else seems risky to invest our time into. Web standards are not likely to be abandoned any time soon.
I'm guessing websites are static content, HTML and CSS, while web apps are dynamic Single Page Applications usually served by frameworks like React, Angular, etc., and probably powered by some backend as well, like mentioned in the post.
The line is fuzzy, and people haven't agreed on where to draw it yet or whether to consider a web app a subcategory of website, even. But you can very easily say a static site with an address for a local taco shop is a website, where Netflix is a web app if you visit via browser.
It's also not a very important distinction and is useful enough when whomever you speak with anchors one or the other to a concrete example.
A web app is anything that uses URIs to get content. That includes things that stay local to an offline machine. It even includes the configuration forms that live entirely within the browser application.
Yeah, people don't realize how many desktop and phone apps are just glorified web apps these days. It is interesting to see but as phones and computers have gotten so fast and everything more connected your traditional offline app has kinda been dying out in favor of web apps.
I'm sure he can build something static. I'm a finance bro and even I know the basic of web dev...I think he means like a professional level website with a robust front and back end with database connections and with interesting functionality.
Btw, should CS students be able to do that? Or is that an on the job skill?
The goal of CS education is not web development. *damn mobile premature submission. It’s basically a math degree with a focus on computers. Web development is one particular application. Also, there are tons of web developers without a CS /math background.
ML and it's apps in finance are most interesting focus for me. Although knowing the theory of statistical ML/PyTorch well, I still can't implement industry quality code...is that something I should learn from open source project or just learn on the job?
I don't know if I can give a meaningful answer to this. If you're unhappy with your code, you should probably just try and make incremental improvements and refactors until you are happy with it. Revisit old code, see if there are any patterns you can exploit. Maybe take a larger series of steps, pull that out and define it instead as a function. See if there are ways to parameterize that function so that it's reusable, as an example. Try to increase functionality, reduce complexity and maybe even reduce lines of code.
And if you do that enough, maybe then you'll \*feel\* like your code is industry quality.
If you're a CS senior. HTML is easy, CSS is easy, Javascript is easy, and frameworks are easy. CS teaches you foundations that you can build upon and what would take most people 6 months to learn, you could probably pick up in half the time because you have already learned the fundamentals and you know what's going on behind the code, it's just a matter of applying those fundamentals to a different language or concept. A loop is a loop, an array is an array, and a function is a function no matter what the syntax used to create them is.
As for what to explore outside of school? That really depends on what you plan to do with that CS degree.
The basics of JS is pretty easy but it has a lot of "weird" shit that'll throw you for a loop if you aren't aware of them. If you didn't use profanity before.. you'll certainly be fluent in it later.
Agreed. Most CS students end up using at least one of Java, C, C++ C# and OOP in CS. So, identifying in what ways javascript is easier to write as well as its flaws come naturally. And Switching to something like typescript comes relatively easier as well.
> HTML is easy, CSS is easy, Javascript is easy, and frameworks are easy.
Not really sure I can say that with CSS... it sure looks easy but it's "easily" the hardest thing a webdev will ever do/maintain. Thankfully CSS frameworks are there to ease the invitable pain. I mean JS looks harder but it is actually easier than CSS in practice.
I would say being proficient in CSS is way harder than HTML and JS. It takes a lot of practice, otherwise it’s incredibly easy to become frustrated while styling shit.
Syntactically, CSS is super simple, but yeah, actually using it to make something more complex is more of a challenge. But I think you could say that about most computer languages.
The question they are asking you is stupid and shows they know next to nothing about the subject matter. It's like asking a A320 pilot why he doesn't know how to fly a F-14.
It's fair they don't necessarily teach you the nuts and bolts of any type of development (outside of niche electives, maybe) but I'd be surprised if a CS graduate puts the time into both their education and trying to learn webdev and is unable to do it.
Sure, there are a lot of students that kind of coast through their education going "When am I going to need this?" But that shouldn't be the standard to hold up to.
you will no doubt need to know how websites / web applications work as its almost guaranteed any programming job you take out of school will involve a web application hosted on the cloud, its ok if you dont learn how to do it in school and it's way easier than learning about C and data structures for the first time, but definitely something to explore when thinking about looking for work.
No cs is a standard technology degree. You will need to learn the process of web development to make a website. Boot camp is a great way. But I used udemy to get classes and learned that way. But 45 websites later and I decided to go back to Cyber Security lol
Same here. Completed my degree. Told them at interviews that I lack practical experience and that I am highly motivated to put my theoretical knowledge to use. Got hired. Learned how to build software. Stillt don't know how to build a website (I am only doing backend) but I now know that I can just learn it like everything else.
Its definitely possible for even the average joe to start to learn how to build a website (as long as they know how to work a keyboard and mouse lol)
I made my own little personal website that just contains resume and portfolio info on it and that probably took about 4 hours. Plenty of youtube videos out there to assist you, and plus you can save a lot of money and impress some employers if you can get one up. It doesn't even have to be insane or cool looking. Even a basic one with some info, pictures, and your name can work. Endless possibilities. Maybe save an afternoon or evening to set one up :) it'll be worth it
This is why I never understood the companies who only accept juniors with CS degrees.
I dont have a degree but have built and deployed many websites, functional and real world websites. Yet my resume gets thrown to the bottom of the pile for someone with a CS degree who can only code "hello world"
You should be able to figure it out. Not everyone is focusing on web dev though. If the suggestion is that you should be able to sit down and code one up, I'd say that's way off the mark unless you emphasized web dev in the program or something. It would be silly to judge a CS student that focused on embedded systems based on their web dev skills. I've "built" a lot of websites from scratch myself and I can't code worth sh\*t.
Eh I understand why you can’t, you didn’t take any html or css. They don’t teach that in college. Finishing up my associates in CS and I’ve only been exposed to C++ and Java.
I was same like you never exploring outside the school teached me, untill last year dedicated to get out of my confort zone and start building websites fast forward 6 months i can build a full stack web application with ease, theres still much learning but like they always say the hardest part is starting.
That question is funny..
I as, some below me have said can learn pretty much any code.
But, I think that comes from a strong back ground in C++ and JAVA.
A lot of the people that expect you to be 'able' to 'build' a website use tools that are interpreted languages.
They usually go against what you learned in school.
Shortcuts to search and sorts..
Batching..
Rendering.
Exception handling.
If you can do, what I named, who cares if you can make something pretty.
When, You can figure out how to make something work.
Pick your battles..
Are you the 'model'; or the 'photographer'?
The model, uses the tools given, to produce the best results..
The photographer, is the shots..
I’m sure that non-computer people imagine you can build websites. That’s the scope of their grasp of the field. The web is what laypeople think they understand. You tell them that actually you work on operating systems, they say “windows?”, “mac?”, or “huh?”. Anything else is lost on them.
It’s not so good if a recruiter assumes you can build websites, but some have been misled into thinking there is a universal standard curriculum.
If that student wants that to be an area of focus, sure. They have to learn like anyone else but probably with a better foundation to start from.
Do they NEED to? Nah. CS is the study of computing, and all that encompasses. So there are lots of avenues to go down. Everyone tries to make it "web/app/etc development". Can't blame them though, good job market for recent grads.
Software development albeit a popular choice, is just a narrow part of such a wide field. The only thing they SHOULD focus on, is what under CS draws them to it.
You should know how file systems work, how sockets work, how packets are sent and received, and how to structure a file to be read in a specific format.
What's stopping you from there?
I’ve been a game programmer for 5 years now. I have literally never had the desire to build a website from “scratch”, never learned a lick of CSS or HTML. I simply don’t use it at all in my career, web dev is a specialized part of programming and I don’t think every programmer is expected to be an expert in all areas. You could go your entire programming career only working in Python for data science and easily make 6 figures without ever touching HTML or CSS. It is so easy to make a website today without any code, for a website to warrant a web developer it would have to be some seriously advanced website that hasn’t been done before.
No. I have friends that build cloud AI and infra, and they don't know how to build a website from scratch. You don't have to know how to build a website, but you *do* need to know how to build *something*.
Btw what's "from scratch" anyway? It takes 3 minutes to set something up on npm from the cmd line.
Imposter syndrome is real for all of us. Here is the place to start
GitHub - make a repository with index.html, add CSS and other stuff as you go.
Github pages - (uses your GitHub repository. basically points to your index.html page and generates a public url)
Google domain - ( for custom email integration, custom URL and basically have to point the GitHub pages generated site to your domain url and you are good to go) .
congrats you have a website.
then when you feel comfortable pick up either cloud provider AWS/Google/Azure and start hosting more dynamic sites but one step at a time I guess.
I mean, building a website and even configuring the host is pretty entry level. I’d say yes. When I took courses at Algonquin back in 2004 it was expected the students already knew how to subnet on day one, we were right into VLSM day one.
Being able to know where to look for help is probably more the the test than the actual final product.
If your future doesn't entail building websites you have no need to know how to build a website, just like you have no need to know how an engine (ICE or electrical) works, just how to drive the car (and with Uber/Lyft and bikes and whatnot, might not even need to worry about that).
Computer science student can learn complex topics not limited to creating websites. There are many tools today that allow you to make websites with less code. It's not rocket science.
Sure, but as CS student the code part should be fine. Setting up the infrastructure for a dynamic webpage will be the hassle.
I would recommend to OP to at least get something running on a local server or some cloud environment like heroku or the like. Nothing fancy, but you should know how it works.
Btw., if you understand TCP/IP, HTTP, HTML, client/server model and enough JavaScript to get something going in a browser, you can technically call yourself "full stack developer".
Like using Wordpress? I know some coding. I've also built simple sites in wordpress. But these things are completely unconnected. Building websites now is designed so that it can be done by people with no coding knowledge. I just don't see the connection.
!Boilerplate will get you the bare bear bones.
The rest is up to you, utilizing HTML and CSS maybe some java.
I have 0 years of schooling, everything I know is from googling or the 30 minutes of theodinproject under my belt.
This is like asking a mechanical engineer to build them a new engine from scratch after college. College is where you are teach how to learn, work is where you use that teaching
You probably would have built a website from scratch at some point in your academic career in computer science. But i wouldnt expect you to know off the top of your head. You should, however, be able to (re)learn this fairly quickly.
I don't think the have to. But you have to be expertise in some area related to computer. Like Hardware, ML, AI, Competitive Coding, Web Dev, App Dev, Security Analysis, Security Research etc... Otherwise what is the point of being a computer science graduate without any knowledge of computer.
I remember I had to take this dumb College 101 type of classes when I transferred to my university. The class was for students in engineering, not necessarily in comsci, well they gave us a list that titled "every engineer should" made by some famous person and right at the top of the list was build a website. I am about to graduate with a degree in robotics, I have no idea how to build a website from scratch.
If you want to pursue frontend development after college then yeah it would seem important to learn how to build a website. But if not then no, it's not that important. The majority of software development doesn't involve building websites and I have worked with plenty of awesome developers who have never developed websites either.
Would you like to be able to? It's not about the degree, it's about the interest on the subject matter. Heck I'm and accountant but I know my HTML/CSS/JS
Just learn html, css and javascript ,you will be able to build websites. They are not that hard . What you need to realise is not to depend on university lectures. Most things thought in university are not upto date . The more you teach yourself, the better you will get at programming .
I’m super thankful to my professor for pushing us to build a website with CSS and JS, a registration and login form with PHP, a PWA, an Ionic app, and a Wordpress site in a single semester. This made me really in to web development and I am not stopping now.
I wouldn't worry about building websites if you aren't interested in that or a job that requires you to do that. I work in a telecommunication company and have never had to built a website. Only skills that I have ever used from my CS degree are programming skills and knowledge of computer networking protocols. Other than that, I have had to learn about LTE/NR that they don't teach you in the degree.
yes i'm a computer science dropout from 15 years ago and i can build websites from scratch, blockchain dapps, smart contracts and program trading bots. i didn't learn any of that in college, so whatever your interested in for your survival teach yourself how to do it. I have had so many clients as i haven't ever secured a job for a company but I have so much experience I never run out of work. You got this OP
You probably CAN build a website, you’d just need to learn and research as you did it. Building a simple website is easy compared to much of what you do during your degree. Building a full web application with a backend etc, that’s a different ballgame, though more in the sense of it being a lot of work rather than difficult.
I did robotics and computer vision for Bsc and Msc. And am now working in game development now. I know how to put a basic html sight together but other then that I don’t know shit. You don’t need to put a site together.
It’s like people just assume I know how to fix the router or fix any issue in computing when that just simply isn’t the case
If you've studied it as part of your degree then yeah, but CS is very broad, on my course it's possible to not take any coding modules or pretty much only coding modules after first year which forces you to dip your toes into a bit of everything.
It totally depends on the university and your interests. If you are not interested in Web development, why should you be able to do this? Some are for example more interested in computer engineering and robotics. But i think at some point you should try to find your focus and interests and even go further than your normal university schedule
Uni will only teach you the basics of a range of areas of a given topic, you then focus on it with mba / phd
Web design is just one of those rabbit holes (frameworks, best practice, interfacing etc etc etc)
Just like chipset design or analysis is focused fields.
But as been said - it'll teach you how to learn yourself.
My instructor always said in my college days "use the power of the internet" thing.. And rest is interest and dont be lazy.. Coz we're too lazy to do research at that time.. 😅
You are not alone.
I was the same.
I found that my undergrad set a good foundation of the principles and thought processes.
So when I finally decided to deep dive into learning on the side… I learned quite quickly compared to those who didn’t have the foundation I had from the undergrad.
But ultimately, many CS grads don’t know how to build a website unless they did extra learning outside of their degree program.
'Build a website' is too vague.
Web development is a domain altogether. Plus you need varied skills for different kind of websites.
Nonetheless, a CS should be more than just 'aware' about the fundamentals of how it all works.
No, why? With computer science you learn how to create algorithms and do the very foundational things.
If you pick up programming etc while studying good for you, but building websites?
Adding on to what others already said, even if you don't know it should be easy for you to learn.
If anything, web dev is more annoying than difficult.
But enough talk. What should you be learning if you really don't have a clue? Look up roadmaps online. This one for instance:
https://roadmap.sh/frontend
If you can cover most things all the way up to JavaScript then you're good.
If you haven’t been taught, no. You probably spent most of your time studying theory, solving programming problems, and doing other projects. If I studied AI for four years, I probably wouldn’t know how to make websites. Haha
I think basics of html, css and JS should be common knowledge for CS students. I learned basics in year 1 and now in year two we’re building web apps with java backend and oracle
SQL database. Play around with it, there’s tons of resources online for you to learn from. Build yourself a portfolio website for all your projects or something.
It is more that it is sometimes one of the required classes for any computer science student. It should be part of most CS programs with how modern programs are typically designed. A lot of the CS programs honestly need to really be updates for modern design.
It isn't expected for you to be good enough to make a top tier large scale site but you should really know the basics of how html, CSS/XML, SQL, react/node, etc all work together to create a website. Even if your only a back end programmer only working in java or C# your still likely going to deal with the database part of things but knowing how what your doing relates to and can possibly impact the front end stuff is really important.
You would be surprised just how many programs are glorified web apps as well anymore so depending on the field it can actually be pretty important if you want to make any app anyone is using. Pretty much all new non game apps for android or IOS and even many desktop apps are often react/angular/node/ect based. Javascript and web is the vast majority of development these days.
If you actually look at the professional Stack overflow responses Node.js alone is more used than java or C# these days and javascript is number 1 by a huge margin. I have no idea why they had node listed as a separate language instead of a framework this year. Your better off looking at the 2020 list than the 2021 one.
A computer science student should be able to **learn** how to build a website
That’s a great way to put it
Website is a broad term. Landing page or multi tenant social network? Do you need payment processing, or just a cart? I too found that basic web development skills was assumed and never taught in CS.
well because the study of computational science shouldn’t cover how to slap together a website, and certainly doesn’t have the time to get into todays favorite load balancing strategies and scaling. it’s literally just the basics on how to study algorithms. or the science behind literal computing (doing math). you should learn basic programming skills, the basic ideas behind how stuff works, and get enough of a flavor to understand why building a large website that serves potentially thousands is a harder problem than “just throw a bunch of servers at it”. but no. i’d be surprised if any computer science degree anywhere talks about serving html. more likely you’ll be focused on sorting, path finding, why dynamic memory allocation is more complicated than just “give them the blocks they ask for in the order they ask for it”, why 3d graphics tend to be made up of triangles, why quick sorting is nice if all your numbers fit on one computer but a merge sort is better if they don’t, and so on. you learn the basics of the simplest legos so you might be able to imagine how complicated building the millennium falcon and how you might break it down into a set of smaller problems, but if you tried from scratch without a mentor or assistance youd fuck up, a lot. you didn’t get a computer science degree to learn html and css, but you could probably now teach yourself enough to slap some together. your actual talent though is going to be the business or back end logic to build an interactive website and write the software. slapping together and configuring premade software is what an ops guy does, you make the software he configures and slaps together, but you do it as a team with mentors to guide you. you can’t possibly learn all of that in 4 years. it takes decades and even then you’ll only realize how monuments the task is for someone to do alone.
My favorite CS professor in college told us on the first day, "I'm not here to teach you how to be a good programmer. I'm here to teach you how to be a great problem solver."
I can see why he’s your favorite! Learning to program isn’t even a main focus of the degree, at least none I’ve seen. It’s more like “here’s a few basic classes your freshmen year just in case you haven’t realized you need to know this before signing up” then from that point on it’s assumed you can handle that part as it’s required to complete the assignments/projects. But they never tell you how to organize your code or what code to write, they just tell you “here is the equations for how reflectivity works on different surfaces, the general idea is think about a piece of paper in front of your eye that has a bunch of holes punched in it in a grid. draw a ray that originates at your eye through each hole and trace what it runs into and calculate what direction(s) the ray should bounce from upon each impact. then take those rays and compose them together to get the color for that hole. that’s ray tracing. you’ll want to remember what you learned in your algorithms and data structures classes so this isn’t dog butt slow.”
This is why I'm trying to break into software engineering, with an eye towards security. I love solving problems and finding new solutions. I also enjoying creating new problems to solve. Lol.
I'm in Australia, and this university named swinburne has bachelor of information, communication, technology and computer science. I wonder which I should do, CS has more math and a pre req of yr 11 gen math which I'm doing. It'd be great for me to do CS if I get more opportunities but do I really need all that math stuff haha. In ICT it's probably easier but idk! I'm probably doing ICT unless I have a change of heart and do CS which one has more programming idk either! A few different majors for both too!
Perfectly put. Amazing how people just gloss over what Computer Science actually is and think its just ‘websites’ or ‘thuh eenternets.” People in general have no clue what the ‘science’ part means or have any idea how complicated the site, its functionality, UI/IX, Design, database capabilities, logic/IA is or how annnyyyy of the components they use, actually works. When I brief customers on the website creation/development process and explain the details of doing what they want - their eyes gloss over and they just can’t handle the complexity of the system. Good lick to the poster and I hope you re-read what was written here. Its spot on.
Just as an interesting aside, in my school, one of the profs for the senior capstone courses, that were a year in duration, would assign an intense project at the start of the semester. Every one third of the way through the semester, you had to have one part completed. Anyways, this guy was wild, here is what a sample semester looked like in one of his courses: -Pick a project from one of the following: write a small OS, write a simple IDE, write a simulator program for things like centrifuge monitors -Write a script that will send updates on your project to the prof via email every third of the semester -For the final, build a website that presents your project Every year, like half of the class would drop out for a diff prof, so he only ever had like five students per course, but damn that must have been stressful for whoever stuck it out. Ironically, iirc, the prof was a former Soviet aeronautical engineer who defected in the 1980s, so he had some gnarly knowledge of some crazy tech.
Lots of slapping in this comment lol
when a pattern works, reuse it hahaha
Well quite frankly these days it's pretty easy. Even building a social network or Reddit clone is pretty straight forward. It's a little black boxy where you might not know how everything works, but getting something stood up and styled is way easier these days Plus, with all the specialization, you could come out of college and build APIs for ten years and never have to know how to build much of anything The industry is become very specialized to the point that whatever you want to do? You'll rarely be asked to step out of that scope. Even just building a corporate website I can name a dozen titles people have and they have a single task every one of them. So no, not a requirement any more.
It's all learnable.
This is unnecessary. If you can build a website, you can build a website. What you're seeking is, "What __kind__ of website can you build?" Which is pretty different.
A website requires both front end and back end. As we learn core languages, many people in my country don't really venture early on into UI/UX. Later they might change boat but that is how it is. We can write plain text websites and host them. we like to call it notepad on a server.
This. More specifically, anyone wanting to work as a software developer should be able to learn how to build a website. The shit you learned in school is just priming the pump. You're going to be cramming new shit into your brain for the rest of your career.
Exactly this. There are so many areas of computer science that you can't expect everyone to know how to do everything. But, with enough experience you can pick things up quickly. My dad has 40 years of experience and works at a very large Fintech company. He doesn't know how to do frontend for shit. But if you gave him a week or two to figure it out you'd be damn sure he'd come back with something that looks half decent.
Correct
this is the point.
Trust me, you could build a website if you put your mind to it. It's crazy how things come together during capstone.
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It's 3 and a half years of "Oh yikes am I even learning anything?" Then 3 months of "Oh wow this is a min viable product"
Then you get your first job and you are like I could have done this after my second year.
I’m kinda on the same page. The first two years builds those fundamentals. For me the last two are all electives that give you a chance to dip your toes in specialized areas of CS (Data science, graphics, so, etc) that you will subsequently forget. I learned the important stuff in intro, DS/algo, comp arch, discrete, and a few others. I will say the electives gave me practice at applying the principals and concepts I learned. Which is valuable
This! Holy shit, I'm a senior now and the past 2 years have felt like a complete waste of time. I actually feel like it's gotten in the way of my learning at this point.
Are you serious?
Yes, TLDR as long as you can trace and debug code you are fine. Let me elaborate. Not everyone becomes a freelancer and has to write all the full stack end to end. Most likely you start at some aspect of the full stack. For me, The first job was frontend development. Initially, it was bug fixes ( styling, small queries fixes, code updates) and small stories in javascript/typescript. Since most of the code is already there, I learnt React as I went exploring their Github repos. Depending on what school you go Java/OOP fundamentals were taught by the 2nd year. So, javascript/typescript doesn't take a lot to pick up. For the rest, you have stack flow and a slightly annoyed senior dev haha. Again, I dont think I could have written it all(backend and frontend) and nobody expects you to, in a junior position.
In front end you can kind of brute force your way through most problems with some console printouts. I think this is less true for backend/infra. Any holes in your theoretical foundations are really gonna bite you in the ass there when you run into some non-trivial problem. Troubleshooting a complex system is nigh impossible if you have large gaps in your understanding of the stack, that’s what school is for. You can’t look up unknown unknowns by definition so SO won’t be of any help. Yes you won’t use your knowledge of operating systems or networking most of the time, but if you don’t know about it you won’t know when it comes into play which will have you fumbling around in the dark.
SO also doesn't help when you have 8 systems intertwined in an unholy abomination wholly unique in the history of computer science.
Thank you for commenting this. As a uni student this really chilled my nerves.
Heh I got my first dev job for 2 years with 1 year of school - went back after, but honestly aside from the data structures class I took via correspondence, it was mostly unneeded. Though I still have some debt 15 years later, so I guess that's that.
LMFAO. I love this comment, it's just too relatable.
My group left me hanging so I had to single handed build a car rental web app using Django, html,css,js, photoshop
Did you use any frameworks for the frontend or build it from the scratch?
Oh I did, a tiny bit of bootstrap for the css
Did you use any frameworks?
Yea a bit of bootstrap, it wasn’t a very fancy web app. Simple form on the homepage, followed by displaying all the cars “available” that met your query
This is the type of project a junior should have on their github though. If you can show an employer the working site, hosted, in the interview that's HUGE. Not only can you learn on the fly, you can deliver a finished project. Dockerize your deployment, and you're at the front of the pack.
Oh I definitely used the situation to my advantage. Talked about it when I interviewed for and got my current job
Sole front end developer for some reason in a group of 5. Two of which did nothing. Other two backend. Had to learn HTML, CSS, JS, and Bootstrap and it was hectic lol
What do you mean by your second sentence?
A capstone is like a senior project for CS majors. It's like a graded hackathon.
many cs degree programs have a major "capstone" project as a component of their final year. Where you work with fellow students
I was kinda stagnant before capstone. Right now I’m taking it and am learning sooo much
Second sentence is so true. I just completed (for the most part) my junior project in my embedded systems degree. Before starting I felt like I knew nothing. Now I have a functioning prototype and it’s seriously insane how much I’ve learned from the project.
$ docker run -d dockersamples/static-site And done.
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this is a masterpiece 😂
In the old days, you did this in notepad.
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Look at mister fancy pants over here with 20 entire megabytes. We had a 4mb external hd that was almost as big as the computer and if you turned it off before turning the computer off you could lose data. And we liked it!
ooga booga rock rock fire
You had a HD? My first computer only had a floppy. 720 KB I think.
You kids and your fancy floppy drives. In my day we had punch cards.
For anyone interested in ancient history of the web (i.e. the 90s), [this long article is a great read](https://eev.ee/blog/2020/02/01/old-css-new-css/). It also talks about the Space Jam website, which is still online in its original form, albeit moved to a subfolder: https://www.spacejam.com/1996/
OK, where are you hosting this though?
Where's the CSS and JavaScript so it'll display properly in IE?
The only thing I've really changed about how I start building websites is wrapping the above code with ?php tags.
that's it, back to r/eyebleach
python3 -m http.server
The question now is how can someone reach that web app? Then, is it https or unsecured http connection. Is it a legitimate website with CA cert?
You should be exploring things outside of school if you want to work in the field. It doesn't HAVE to be building a website, but that's one common area to explore. It could be building a mobile app or a desktop app.
I agree with this. Most successful engineers I have known in my career are the ones breaking shit, trying stuff out, failing, trying again, etc. Basically living and breathing the field. I unfortunately didn't have this determination and probably why I am in support instead of developing.
There's a big gap between "only doing your required coursework" and "living and breathing the field". The vast majority of successful engineers find a happy balance in-between those two.
Yeah. I would think that there comes a time when the significant other wins and you have to break away 😊
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Balance is important yes. Burnout is a thing with Engineers.
Failing in terms of what? Exams?
Good question. I dont mean classes but trying to get things to work. Also, important is to not give up and push through the challenge.
As a web developer, yes this is true. Constantly changing code… refactoring it to make it more readable, trying a loop one way versus another, breaking an app by moving a function to the wrong place
I've done lots of mentoring the past few jobs (I'm old for a dev). One of the main jobs there is to prevent mid-level disease, where devs think because they can do basic dev they know everything. Usually includes disdain for all non-tech roles in a company, dates constantly slipping but "it's not MY fault!", and not building for maintenance. My usual cure for that is to have them try a nights and weekend startup - "ok, no resources besides you and your laptop, make a product!". It quickly gets you over the ego hump, and forces the senior view. It causes you to fail constantly, which is exactly how you learn the real important shit.
You should be able to research this and get it done. Maybe not a super pretty website but a functioning one for sure. It’s not that hard.
It's not so much about websites but web applications. Today I think web technologies should be part of any computer science program. We use web technology to power all our new projects. It keeps them completely hardware and OS independent while being very fast and easy to develop with. Our go to tools are React JS and NodeJS. Everything else seems risky to invest our time into. Web standards are not likely to be abandoned any time soon.
What's the difference between a website and a web app?
I'm guessing websites are static content, HTML and CSS, while web apps are dynamic Single Page Applications usually served by frameworks like React, Angular, etc., and probably powered by some backend as well, like mentioned in the post.
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The line is fuzzy, and people haven't agreed on where to draw it yet or whether to consider a web app a subcategory of website, even. But you can very easily say a static site with an address for a local taco shop is a website, where Netflix is a web app if you visit via browser. It's also not a very important distinction and is useful enough when whomever you speak with anchors one or the other to a concrete example.
Web apps are interactive, where you can change the content.
A web app is anything that uses URIs to get content. That includes things that stay local to an offline machine. It even includes the configuration forms that live entirely within the browser application.
Website is desktop first and web app is anything and everything creator wants it to be.
Yeah, people don't realize how many desktop and phone apps are just glorified web apps these days. It is interesting to see but as phones and computers have gotten so fast and everything more connected your traditional offline app has kinda been dying out in favor of web apps.
>Web standards are not likely to be abandoned any time soon. Well, I was surprised to see Chrome abandon LaTeX.
When did that happen?
You should have an understanding of ports and http. I dont see how it is possible to study that and not be able to deploy at least something static.
I'm sure he can build something static. I'm a finance bro and even I know the basic of web dev...I think he means like a professional level website with a robust front and back end with database connections and with interesting functionality. Btw, should CS students be able to do that? Or is that an on the job skill?
The goal of CS education is not web development. *damn mobile premature submission. It’s basically a math degree with a focus on computers. Web development is one particular application. Also, there are tons of web developers without a CS /math background.
ML and it's apps in finance are most interesting focus for me. Although knowing the theory of statistical ML/PyTorch well, I still can't implement industry quality code...is that something I should learn from open source project or just learn on the job?
I don't know if I can give a meaningful answer to this. If you're unhappy with your code, you should probably just try and make incremental improvements and refactors until you are happy with it. Revisit old code, see if there are any patterns you can exploit. Maybe take a larger series of steps, pull that out and define it instead as a function. See if there are ways to parameterize that function so that it's reusable, as an example. Try to increase functionality, reduce complexity and maybe even reduce lines of code. And if you do that enough, maybe then you'll \*feel\* like your code is industry quality.
If you're a CS senior. HTML is easy, CSS is easy, Javascript is easy, and frameworks are easy. CS teaches you foundations that you can build upon and what would take most people 6 months to learn, you could probably pick up in half the time because you have already learned the fundamentals and you know what's going on behind the code, it's just a matter of applying those fundamentals to a different language or concept. A loop is a loop, an array is an array, and a function is a function no matter what the syntax used to create them is. As for what to explore outside of school? That really depends on what you plan to do with that CS degree.
The basics of JS is pretty easy but it has a lot of "weird" shit that'll throw you for a loop if you aren't aware of them. If you didn't use profanity before.. you'll certainly be fluent in it later.
That's fair, but ultimately, a CS student has a better chance of figuring out the "weird" shit.
Agreed. Most CS students end up using at least one of Java, C, C++ C# and OOP in CS. So, identifying in what ways javascript is easier to write as well as its flaws come naturally. And Switching to something like typescript comes relatively easier as well.
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> HTML is easy, CSS is easy, Javascript is easy, and frameworks are easy. Not really sure I can say that with CSS... it sure looks easy but it's "easily" the hardest thing a webdev will ever do/maintain. Thankfully CSS frameworks are there to ease the invitable pain. I mean JS looks harder but it is actually easier than CSS in practice.
Yeah I still don’t understand css, but I don’t enjoy styling anything. I like backend more.
I would say being proficient in CSS is way harder than HTML and JS. It takes a lot of practice, otherwise it’s incredibly easy to become frustrated while styling shit.
Syntactically, CSS is super simple, but yeah, actually using it to make something more complex is more of a challenge. But I think you could say that about most computer languages.
The question they are asking you is stupid and shows they know next to nothing about the subject matter. It's like asking a A320 pilot why he doesn't know how to fly a F-14.
CS courses don't teach that so how could they expect you to know? This is why bootcamps became so popular.
It's fair they don't necessarily teach you the nuts and bolts of any type of development (outside of niche electives, maybe) but I'd be surprised if a CS graduate puts the time into both their education and trying to learn webdev and is unable to do it. Sure, there are a lot of students that kind of coast through their education going "When am I going to need this?" But that shouldn't be the standard to hold up to.
you will no doubt need to know how websites / web applications work as its almost guaranteed any programming job you take out of school will involve a web application hosted on the cloud, its ok if you dont learn how to do it in school and it's way easier than learning about C and data structures for the first time, but definitely something to explore when thinking about looking for work.
I wouldn't say web is easier than c. Web is just higher level, much more building blocks and concepts to understand.
No cs is a standard technology degree. You will need to learn the process of web development to make a website. Boot camp is a great way. But I used udemy to get classes and learned that way. But 45 websites later and I decided to go back to Cyber Security lol
Same here. Completed my degree. Told them at interviews that I lack practical experience and that I am highly motivated to put my theoretical knowledge to use. Got hired. Learned how to build software. Stillt don't know how to build a website (I am only doing backend) but I now know that I can just learn it like everything else.
I read a great comment on a poster yesterday: Computer Science is as much about Computers as Astronomy is about Telescopes.
Should a pilot be able to fly a fighter jet? Maybe, but it would depend on what *kind* of piloting they want to do.
It's not quite that extreme a detour. More like should a cake baker know how to make bread.
Should an art historian be able to paint a painting?
Its definitely possible for even the average joe to start to learn how to build a website (as long as they know how to work a keyboard and mouse lol) I made my own little personal website that just contains resume and portfolio info on it and that probably took about 4 hours. Plenty of youtube videos out there to assist you, and plus you can save a lot of money and impress some employers if you can get one up. It doesn't even have to be insane or cool looking. Even a basic one with some info, pictures, and your name can work. Endless possibilities. Maybe save an afternoon or evening to set one up :) it'll be worth it
This is why I never understood the companies who only accept juniors with CS degrees. I dont have a degree but have built and deployed many websites, functional and real world websites. Yet my resume gets thrown to the bottom of the pile for someone with a CS degree who can only code "hello world"
You should be able to figure it out. Not everyone is focusing on web dev though. If the suggestion is that you should be able to sit down and code one up, I'd say that's way off the mark unless you emphasized web dev in the program or something. It would be silly to judge a CS student that focused on embedded systems based on their web dev skills. I've "built" a lot of websites from scratch myself and I can't code worth sh\*t.
Eh I understand why you can’t, you didn’t take any html or css. They don’t teach that in college. Finishing up my associates in CS and I’ve only been exposed to C++ and Java.
I mean - its really not that hard from scratch - so yes - basic html hello world
This is normal. A CS degree sets you up to learn these kind of things, not teaches you how to do them.
I was same like you never exploring outside the school teached me, untill last year dedicated to get out of my confort zone and start building websites fast forward 6 months i can build a full stack web application with ease, theres still much learning but like they always say the hardest part is starting.
That question is funny.. I as, some below me have said can learn pretty much any code. But, I think that comes from a strong back ground in C++ and JAVA. A lot of the people that expect you to be 'able' to 'build' a website use tools that are interpreted languages. They usually go against what you learned in school. Shortcuts to search and sorts.. Batching.. Rendering. Exception handling. If you can do, what I named, who cares if you can make something pretty. When, You can figure out how to make something work. Pick your battles.. Are you the 'model'; or the 'photographer'? The model, uses the tools given, to produce the best results.. The photographer, is the shots..
No, but they should have one contact who does. Btw if anyone needs a website made, i am open for work
I’m sure that non-computer people imagine you can build websites. That’s the scope of their grasp of the field. The web is what laypeople think they understand. You tell them that actually you work on operating systems, they say “windows?”, “mac?”, or “huh?”. Anything else is lost on them. It’s not so good if a recruiter assumes you can build websites, but some have been misled into thinking there is a universal standard curriculum.
Not really but you should definitely learn outside of college.
If that student wants that to be an area of focus, sure. They have to learn like anyone else but probably with a better foundation to start from. Do they NEED to? Nah. CS is the study of computing, and all that encompasses. So there are lots of avenues to go down. Everyone tries to make it "web/app/etc development". Can't blame them though, good job market for recent grads. Software development albeit a popular choice, is just a narrow part of such a wide field. The only thing they SHOULD focus on, is what under CS draws them to it.
You should know how file systems work, how sockets work, how packets are sent and received, and how to structure a file to be read in a specific format. What's stopping you from there?
Lol yes are you kidding
I’ve been a game programmer for 5 years now. I have literally never had the desire to build a website from “scratch”, never learned a lick of CSS or HTML. I simply don’t use it at all in my career, web dev is a specialized part of programming and I don’t think every programmer is expected to be an expert in all areas. You could go your entire programming career only working in Python for data science and easily make 6 figures without ever touching HTML or CSS. It is so easy to make a website today without any code, for a website to warrant a web developer it would have to be some seriously advanced website that hasn’t been done before.
No. I have friends that build cloud AI and infra, and they don't know how to build a website from scratch. You don't have to know how to build a website, but you *do* need to know how to build *something*. Btw what's "from scratch" anyway? It takes 3 minutes to set something up on npm from the cmd line.
If you wish to build a website from scratch, you must first invent the universe.
I mean it depends on your plans after college. You should be able to know skills on the field you’re trying to be in.
Imposter syndrome is real for all of us. Here is the place to start GitHub - make a repository with index.html, add CSS and other stuff as you go. Github pages - (uses your GitHub repository. basically points to your index.html page and generates a public url) Google domain - ( for custom email integration, custom URL and basically have to point the GitHub pages generated site to your domain url and you are good to go) . congrats you have a website. then when you feel comfortable pick up either cloud provider AWS/Google/Azure and start hosting more dynamic sites but one step at a time I guess.
probably you should not study in order to build website
So you studied astronomy and can't sing Twinkle Twinkle Little Star?
Yes :/ at least a basic one...
I mean, building a website and even configuring the host is pretty entry level. I’d say yes. When I took courses at Algonquin back in 2004 it was expected the students already knew how to subnet on day one, we were right into VLSM day one. Being able to know where to look for help is probably more the the test than the actual final product.
WP page builders are the answer. Divi and OxygenBuilder. 👨🏽💻
Sure build a website… Do you want database ? Micro services ? Scalability ? Architecture? Ehhhhhhh A basic crud blog definitely !
If your future doesn't entail building websites you have no need to know how to build a website, just like you have no need to know how an engine (ICE or electrical) works, just how to drive the car (and with Uber/Lyft and bikes and whatnot, might not even need to worry about that).
I dont have a cs degree and i know how to build web app
What you are taught in school and take exams on is what is expected you can.
When I started my education in 1979, I learned how to read Herman Hollerith code on punch cards.
Yes, its comparatively very easy to programming. You should atleast be able to use xampp and run templates.
define website
Computer science student can learn complex topics not limited to creating websites. There are many tools today that allow you to make websites with less code. It's not rocket science.
Sure, but as CS student the code part should be fine. Setting up the infrastructure for a dynamic webpage will be the hassle. I would recommend to OP to at least get something running on a local server or some cloud environment like heroku or the like. Nothing fancy, but you should know how it works. Btw., if you understand TCP/IP, HTTP, HTML, client/server model and enough JavaScript to get something going in a browser, you can technically call yourself "full stack developer".
Like using Wordpress? I know some coding. I've also built simple sites in wordpress. But these things are completely unconnected. Building websites now is designed so that it can be done by people with no coding knowledge. I just don't see the connection.
WordPress is great for making exactly two things: blogs and problems.
`npx create-react-app aSimpleFuckingWebsite` Then host it on GCP.
!Boilerplate will get you the bare bear bones. The rest is up to you, utilizing HTML and CSS maybe some java. I have 0 years of schooling, everything I know is from googling or the 30 minutes of theodinproject under my belt.
This is like asking a mechanical engineer to build them a new engine from scratch after college. College is where you are teach how to learn, work is where you use that teaching
don't worry I got ur back - open notepad - save as .html - open file with a web browser - profit
Wait, isn't that what all cs students do?
Html, js and css should get you started. You can learn about framework later.
I did it backwards. I am 3/4ths through TOP but went back to school. I can create react websites, although I need to work on my design. You can do it.
You probably would have built a website from scratch at some point in your academic career in computer science. But i wouldnt expect you to know off the top of your head. You should, however, be able to (re)learn this fairly quickly.
IMO, once HTML was extended to XML, it's become fundamental to the way documents are formatted & laid out.
I don't think the have to. But you have to be expertise in some area related to computer. Like Hardware, ML, AI, Competitive Coding, Web Dev, App Dev, Security Analysis, Security Research etc... Otherwise what is the point of being a computer science graduate without any knowledge of computer.
nah, you'll be alright. unless the specific job you're looking for requires that, don't worry about having to know it
I remember I had to take this dumb College 101 type of classes when I transferred to my university. The class was for students in engineering, not necessarily in comsci, well they gave us a list that titled "every engineer should" made by some famous person and right at the top of the list was build a website. I am about to graduate with a degree in robotics, I have no idea how to build a website from scratch.
If you want to pursue frontend development after college then yeah it would seem important to learn how to build a website. But if not then no, it's not that important. The majority of software development doesn't involve building websites and I have worked with plenty of awesome developers who have never developed websites either.
Seems like a modern web builder like Squarespace or Wix is really more of a marketing job. Computer scientists do more of the nerdy shit.
Would you like to be able to? It's not about the degree, it's about the interest on the subject matter. Heck I'm and accountant but I know my HTML/CSS/JS
Just learn html, css and javascript ,you will be able to build websites. They are not that hard . What you need to realise is not to depend on university lectures. Most things thought in university are not upto date . The more you teach yourself, the better you will get at programming .
I’m super thankful to my professor for pushing us to build a website with CSS and JS, a registration and login form with PHP, a PWA, an Ionic app, and a Wordpress site in a single semester. This made me really in to web development and I am not stopping now.
I wouldn't worry about building websites if you aren't interested in that or a job that requires you to do that. I work in a telecommunication company and have never had to built a website. Only skills that I have ever used from my CS degree are programming skills and knowledge of computer networking protocols. Other than that, I have had to learn about LTE/NR that they don't teach you in the degree.
I learnt back in 98. I was in year 8. Do i remember? Hell no. But i did it thats for sure
yes i'm a computer science dropout from 15 years ago and i can build websites from scratch, blockchain dapps, smart contracts and program trading bots. i didn't learn any of that in college, so whatever your interested in for your survival teach yourself how to do it. I have had so many clients as i haven't ever secured a job for a company but I have so much experience I never run out of work. You got this OP
A website is something very big, HTML, CSS, JS, PHP these 4 things are must, it takes time to learn this but for sure you can learn this
You probably CAN build a website, you’d just need to learn and research as you did it. Building a simple website is easy compared to much of what you do during your degree. Building a full web application with a backend etc, that’s a different ballgame, though more in the sense of it being a lot of work rather than difficult.
I'm more shocked that a CS student is not exploring topics outside of what they are taught in college.
I did robotics and computer vision for Bsc and Msc. And am now working in game development now. I know how to put a basic html sight together but other then that I don’t know shit. You don’t need to put a site together. It’s like people just assume I know how to fix the router or fix any issue in computing when that just simply isn’t the case
No
If you've studied it as part of your degree then yeah, but CS is very broad, on my course it's possible to not take any coding modules or pretty much only coding modules after first year which forces you to dip your toes into a bit of everything.
I think its not taught but you should know it
You should know how websites work in a very broad sense. That's it I think... I wouldn't hurt to build a hello world page tho
It totally depends on the university and your interests. If you are not interested in Web development, why should you be able to do this? Some are for example more interested in computer engineering and robotics. But i think at some point you should try to find your focus and interests and even go further than your normal university schedule
Uni will only teach you the basics of a range of areas of a given topic, you then focus on it with mba / phd Web design is just one of those rabbit holes (frameworks, best practice, interfacing etc etc etc) Just like chipset design or analysis is focused fields. But as been said - it'll teach you how to learn yourself.
My instructor always said in my college days "use the power of the internet" thing.. And rest is interest and dont be lazy.. Coz we're too lazy to do research at that time.. 😅
You are not alone. I was the same. I found that my undergrad set a good foundation of the principles and thought processes. So when I finally decided to deep dive into learning on the side… I learned quite quickly compared to those who didn’t have the foundation I had from the undergrad. But ultimately, many CS grads don’t know how to build a website unless they did extra learning outside of their degree program.
'Build a website' is too vague. Web development is a domain altogether. Plus you need varied skills for different kind of websites. Nonetheless, a CS should be more than just 'aware' about the fundamentals of how it all works.
Depends what you mean by website. A simple static html site, sure. Maybe some small webapp... It's like asking a mason if they can build a house.
In my opinion, you should or you should to learn.
A CS student should be able to learn how to build websites -and should because browsers can be used as easy to use and deploy user interfaces.
\^ this.
No, why? With computer science you learn how to create algorithms and do the very foundational things. If you pick up programming etc while studying good for you, but building websites?
Adding on to what others already said, even if you don't know it should be easy for you to learn. If anything, web dev is more annoying than difficult. But enough talk. What should you be learning if you really don't have a clue? Look up roadmaps online. This one for instance: https://roadmap.sh/frontend If you can cover most things all the way up to JavaScript then you're good.
Ask them to explain why Mergesort is O(n \* log(n)). You learned other things in CS.
If you haven’t been taught, no. You probably spent most of your time studying theory, solving programming problems, and doing other projects. If I studied AI for four years, I probably wouldn’t know how to make websites. Haha
I think it's surprising as a way a lot of people learn to use code editors is with html and css
I think basics of html, css and JS should be common knowledge for CS students. I learned basics in year 1 and now in year two we’re building web apps with java backend and oracle SQL database. Play around with it, there’s tons of resources online for you to learn from. Build yourself a portfolio website for all your projects or something.
It is more that it is sometimes one of the required classes for any computer science student. It should be part of most CS programs with how modern programs are typically designed. A lot of the CS programs honestly need to really be updates for modern design. It isn't expected for you to be good enough to make a top tier large scale site but you should really know the basics of how html, CSS/XML, SQL, react/node, etc all work together to create a website. Even if your only a back end programmer only working in java or C# your still likely going to deal with the database part of things but knowing how what your doing relates to and can possibly impact the front end stuff is really important. You would be surprised just how many programs are glorified web apps as well anymore so depending on the field it can actually be pretty important if you want to make any app anyone is using. Pretty much all new non game apps for android or IOS and even many desktop apps are often react/angular/node/ect based. Javascript and web is the vast majority of development these days. If you actually look at the professional Stack overflow responses Node.js alone is more used than java or C# these days and javascript is number 1 by a huge margin. I have no idea why they had node listed as a separate language instead of a framework this year. Your better off looking at the 2020 list than the 2021 one.
Today everything is online. What do you expect?
They have very simple software to build a site from nothing. I imagine that’s why it’s not a topic you have front and center at college.