How To Build A Web App, part 1 of ?: Introduction

Photo by Andreas Palmer on Unsplash. Whose desks are that pristine? Sociopaths’, that’s who. Together, you and I shall dirty up ours with some good ol’ grit. In both senses.

This is the first in a series of articles taking you through all the actual steps in building a web app. If you’re an aspiring developer, if mucking around with teensy beginner tutorials frustrates you, if you’d love to build a properly substantial app that does fab things, these articles are for you.

So many let’s-build-a-web-app tutorials irk me. They may well irk you too. Whatever they’re teaching often works great in isolation. In isolation. But you don’t get the slightest sense of context. Of how any programs of this size might work as part of a larger web app. Wasn’t the whole reason you got into web-dev in the first place to build whole, complete applications?

It’s one thing to write, say, your classic Hello World, or a string-reversal function, or even a Fibonacci sequence. But how do you jump from these fiddly-about-y little snippets, to an app you could totally show off on your CV?

Today, class, we’re going to build us that very thing. A web app, written with professional, production-ready code standards (in my own opinion — if you disagree with anything I espouse here and wish to do so classily, then awesome, that’s what comments are for! Go nuts.) I’ll provide all the steps you need to follow along on your own machine. It’ll be something you could in fact show off on your CV. I mean hey, I’ll be showing off these blog posts on mine. Go for it.

I’ll take you through everything. Everything.

Every last step, from beginning to end: the initial overall one-liner concept; its features, in brief and in more detail, described in laypersons’ terms; its architecture, described in more specialised developer terms; the programming techniques we might use to build it (languages, version control, etc.); technologies; code; all kinds of useful bits and bobs.

I’ll aim everything at a beginner-to-intermediate mindset. I’ll include all the programming code as I go, and make it publicly available on GitHub (and if you don’t know what GitHub is, worry not, in due course I’ll explain what that is too.

Next time: what should our app actually do? What problem do we want to solve? Read on.