From Vanilla HTML to Next.js: My First Year of Web Development

A year ago, my entire toolkit was HTML, CSS and just enough JavaScript to make a hamburger menu work. Today I ship Next.js applications with TypeScript, server components and CI-style deployment on Vercel. This is what actually happened in between.

The first real lesson: fundamentals compound. I spent months on vanilla HTML/CSS before touching a framework, and it felt slow at the time. But when I finally opened React, components made instant sense — because I already understood the DOM they were abstracting.

The second lesson: deploy everything. My first portfolio went live on GitHub Pages the same week I finished it. Having a real URL changed my psychology completely — projects stopped being homework and started being products someone might actually see.

The third lesson: TypeScript earlier than you think. I resisted it because tutorials made it look like extra work. In reality, it caught my bugs before the browser did, and reading typed code taught me how experienced developers structure data.

If you're starting today from a small town, with a phone and patience: the stack is free, the docs are free, and deployment is free. The only real cost is consistency. Ship something small every week and put it on GitHub — a year from now, that graph becomes your resume.