When I first started out coding, I was sickened with impostor syndrome. All these great web developers with their fancy portfolios. But I’m not them. I can’t design anything at all. I can’t make things look beautiful or elegant.
But, the world is rifled with “learn to program by becoming a web developer”.

I felt like I was destined to be a bad programmer as I couldn’t do web development no matter how much I tried.

As I grew up, I realised that I don’t have to be a web developer. Backend developers are just as cool, and even cooler to me personally.

I feel like this is because:

• Web developers have more to show off
• The vast majority of people becoming programmers go into web development (likely due to the fact that the web developers know how to build a well designed course / website)
• Websites like Dev.to are predominantly about web development (sort by top posts of all time, it’s all web dev 😎)

Soo if you’re a beginner programmer, I wanted to let you know that you don’t have to be a web developer to be a good programmer. You don’t even have to touch HTML if you like!

There are thousands of programmers not involved in web development. You don’t even have to be a backend developer (that develops server-side applications). There are thousands of jobs where you develop internal tooling, databases, security and more.

Remember. Web development is not the only goal. You can become a great programmer without touching HTML or CSS.

While I’m not the best example, my projects have around ~9k GitHub stars. Hopefully you can see that people love non-web projects just as much as they do web projects. And you can use GitHub as your portfolio instead of some fancy Vue / React / Whatever JS framework is popular portfolio.

One last time.

You don’t have to be a web developer to become a programmer 💖

Feel free to follow me on Twitter:
https://twitter.com/bee_sec_san

This content was originally published here.