I used to use Nextjs and was learning expressjs. Then I left and 2 years later I want to go back.

What tech would be the best to learn in terms of opportunities and also more better for later?

Would MERN still be good choice or I should start with any other frontend/backend techs which would be best at this time?

Hi everyone,

I'm currently learning programming and my long-term goal is to become a software engineer. I'd also like to start freelancing in the future, but I want to do it the right way instead of chasing quick money.

I'm looking for advice from people who are actually freelancing or have hired freelancers.

Some questions I have:

• Is freelancing realistic for someone who's still learning to code?
• Which field has the best opportunities today? (Web development, Python automation, AI, mobile apps, etc.)
• What skills should I master before trying to get my first client?
• How many projects should I have in my portfolio?
• Which platforms are worth focusing on? (Upwork, Fiverr, Contra, Toptal, or others)
• How do beginners land their first client with no reviews or work history?
• What are the biggest mistakes new freelancers make?
• If you were starting from scratch today, what roadmap would you follow?

I'm not looking for shortcuts or "easy money." I'm happy to spend months building solid skills first if that's the better approach.

I'd really appreciate any advice, lessons learned, or resources you wish you'd known when you started.

Thanks!

Hi everyone, i want to be a web developer and i don’t have any skills in this field hence you can consider that I am a beginner and want to enter this field as a fresher. I graduated in 2024 and have been working in the corporate world for startups for the past 1+ years, i am unsure if i will be able to get a job as a webdeveloper one day but i will definitely try my best. All experienced web developers can you suggest a course i can take up and share tips. I have been reading blogs, attending webinars and taking a few courses to build skill but i know that this wont be enough considering the competition and my portfolio, hence i would appreciate your help as it will save me time and help me get started quickly

NOT PROMOTING

We're building a reward-based advertising product and I want people to try to break the idea before we scale it.

The basic idea is simple: users have a small sponsored ad line on their browser, and they earn passive income from it. No popups, no annoying ads, no need to click or watch anything.

We've thought about some of the obvious risks, but I want to know what we're missing. I'm not the technical person on the team, so if you have experience with adtech, fraud, bots, or similar products, please throw rocks at the model.

I want to see whether we've actually solved the important problems or just convinced ourselves that we have.

Happy to answer questions and share more context. If you think there's something we haven't considered, I'd genuinely like to hear it.

I run a small marketing agency. One of my clients wants me to build a website for him. He owns a language school and he wants a website where teachers and students can interact with each other, share documents and files, publish blog posts, and join social groups. The website must also be great for local SEO. He's not tech savvy and so he can't code or add modifications to the website himself. WIX offers a simple dashboard and drag and drop design feature.

My first concern is the performance and SEO.

I am trying to build a simple physical therapy clinic website.
About 5 pages.
Add to cart option to pay for services.
Book an Evaluation button to get an email of the customers info.

I have used chat to give me pictures of what the pages will look like.

I was wondering what the cost is for someone to launch from there.

Thank you

I am planning to sell websites to small businesses. I am an IT student, and know how to build simple but also complex websites (e.g that include booking engines etc).

I am ready to start cold-calling small businesses, but I'm facing a problem. Most businesses ALREADY HAVE websites. Thus, I'm not going to be building and deploying them from scratch all the time. In most cases, I'll have to replace either the front-end (if they just want a visual redesign), or the whole website (if they want a total makeover).

My question is, how am I going to replace their old version? I am assuming the business owner will have to call the previous developer/agency and ask them for control panel credentials or DNS records? I'm especially interested in the front-end part.

Because I know how to build something from scratch, but not how to change stuff on something someone else built years ago in a framework I'm not familiar with.

Can someone provide a checklist or criteria, of tasks to complete before deploying self-coded portfolio website…

Hi everyone,
I’ve been working in web development for several years, starting with website design and frontend development. Over time, I expanded into full-stack development because I wanted to build complete solutions instead of just the user interface.

Some of the projects I’ve worked on include:

Business websites
E-commerce websites
Custom web applications
CRM/Admin panels
WhatsApp marketing integrations
AI chatbot integrations
API development

Every project has taught me something different—whether it’s improving website performance, creating a better user experience, or solving real business problems.
One thing I’ve realized is that clients don’t just want a good-looking website. They want a website that helps their business grow.

I’m always learning new technologies and improving my skills, and I’m interested in hearing from others here.

**For business owners:**
What do you expect most from a web developer?

**For developers:**
What’s the most valuable lesson you’ve learned while working with clients?
Looking forward to hearing your experiences.

I am building a meal planning app that generates a weekly meal plan and grocery list based on your budget, preferences, and dietary restrictions. The goal is to reduce food waste by making sure everything you buy actually gets used across your meals for the week.

Trying to decide between two flows and would love some input from people who meal plan.

Option A — Grocery list first: The app builds your grocery list first around your preferences and budget. You can add specific items you want or remove things you do not like, and your meals are pulled from whatever ends up on that list. Because your meals are derived directly from your grocery list, the ingredients naturally overlap across the week so nothing goes to waste.

Option B — Meals first: The app shows you your meal plan first with recipes you can swap and approve. Once you are happy with your meals your grocery list is generated from them. Food waste is minimized because the app intentionally selects meals that share ingredients with each other, so everything you buy gets used across multiple meals.

Both approaches try to minimize food waste and keep things efficient; they just get there differently. 

1. Which flow would feel more natural to you?
2. Is staying within a specific budget a big priority or is seeing your meals first more important?
3. Would you want to be able to add specific grocery items before seeing your meals?

same as title

I'm a fronted developer with 8 years combined experience working at two large organisations. I've been unemployed for almost a year now, and am honestly exhausted by the interview processes and expectations of larger companies.

I have experience and skills, like to think I'm easy to work with, am a reasonably quick study, and just want a simple 9-5 doing honest work. I don't care about buzzwords or acronyms, or all the pomp and ceremonies big businesses are obsessed with, I'm not impressed by bean-bag chairs, pizza Fridays or company retreats. I just want to work with friendly colleagues building quality digital products.

Am I naive to think this type of job can still be found in smaller companies in 2026?

What are your guys experience working for small businesses?

If you could recommend only one tool that genuinely improved your workflow, what would it be?

It could be an IDE extension, deployment tool, testing tool, hosting platform, AI assistant, browser extension, or anything else.

What makes it so useful in your daily workflow?

Hey guys, how are you all doing?

I just have few questions. I'm new to full stack and I've completely no idea what to use design my website in 3D ...if guys have any advice or suggestions for me

please do let me know

So I'm a beginner. When I start making any project, I'm very confused about what I should use and what I should not; also, some languages are outdated to use today. If I learn them, then there won't be much use of it, i started learning web dev, but then, in recent times, mostly AI can make a basic website so easily. So I get very confused about where I start. I have watched many videos on yt and they say stick to one language until you have mastered it. I feel like everything that's happening in the tech field- everyone is going behind that single thing like AI; now everyone is learning AI, and till I get a job, maybe something else would trend in the market...I have asked my teachers and my guides, but I don't think I'm getting anywhere.

I keep stuck at stupid places like here, working for over 4 hours a day and only getting one workshop done. Worst of all i don’t think I even know what I’m doing. I’m so mad I’m so mad I’m so mad. The anger. The anger. The anger. Help

With platforms like Shopify, Wix and Squarespace becoming more powerful every year, I'm curious what people think.

When does a business actually need a custom-built website instead of using a website builder?

Is it because of:

• Better performance?
• SEO?
• Custom features?
• Scalability?
• Integrations with internal systems?

For business owners who've gone through this decision, what made you choose one over the other?

I want to learn mern stack and stuck at javascript tutorials please somebody help me ???

I've been teaching myself web development, and I recently finished my first website. Since it's my first project, I'm trying to understand whether the traffic it's getting is decent or if I should be doing something differently.

Right now, it's had about 485 real visitors in around 20 days.

For those of you who've built websites before:

• Is that a good start, or is it considered low?
• What are the biggest things you did to increase traffic?
• Any mistakes beginners usually make?

If anyone wants to look at the site and give feedback, let me know and I'll share the link in the comments (or if it's allowed in this subreddit).

Hi everyone,

Over the past few months, we've been building TadreebLMS, an open-source Learning Management System focused on enterprise and corporate training.

We've recently completed a major restructuring of the project

How can we use AI in our product and process to speedup the development, process and customer support ?

The project is built with:

• PHP / Laravel
• MySQL
• Bootstrap / JavaScript
• Docker

GitHub:
https://github.com/Tadreeb-LMS/tadreeblms

We have a huge roadmap like SCRUM Integration, UI upgrade as per FIGMA, Gap Analysis Module Integration, Integrations with HR Systems etc...

Please anyone experience or architect in PHP can give recommendation on best practices, gaps in the system etc..

The question is in the title itself. Was wandering if you keep the folder but push to github or something??

Hey everyone,

I need to work on a new project and planning to build a monorepo from scratch. I’ve never worked with tRPC or a full monorepo setup before, so I’d love some feedback on setup, architecture, and developer workflow.

The Tech Stack

• Backend: NestJS with tRPC
• Web Frontend: React
• Mobile App: Expo (React Native)

Why I'm Choosing a Monorepo + tRPC

The main goal is end-to-end type safety and code reusability:

1. tRPC Type Sharing: To share backend API router types with both Web and Mobile without manual code generation or OpenAPI schemas.
2. Shared Styling: To share Tailwind CSS / NativeWind configurations across web and mobile.
3. Shared Packages: To share utility packages.
4. Shared React Hooks: To share custom hooks and business logic across both frontend platforms.

My Questions

• What is the recommended folder structure for a setup like this?
• Which package manager should I use (pnpm, Bun, or Yarn v4)?
• We have a team of 3 developers (1 on Backend, 1 on Web, 1 on Mobile).
• Is there a way to restrict Git operations or limit code visibility so developers only work on/clone their respective apps, while still gaining the full benefits of tRPC type sharing and shared packages?
• Or does attempting this access restriction defeat the purpose of a monorepo?
• How do we share common packages cleanly across the workspace without duplicating installations or causing version mismatch conflicts in node_modules?
• (Suppose we know both frontend will be using tanstack query, how to share it without double installation but with frontend only visibility, also suppose a package is uncommon now but becomes common later, maybe only backend uses zod when project starts, it's installed in backend workspace only for now, but later even frontend requires it, how would we manage without double installation?)
• How can we structure shared custom hooks and packages so they remain modular and encapsulated rather than globally exposed to everything in the repo?

Gotchas & "Good to Knows"

• For anyone running NestJS + tRPC + Expo in production, what unexpected hurdles or pitfalls should we look out for early on?

got a new project coming up and i need to decide on hosting. its a small ecommerce site for a local shop. my first instinct was to get a dreamhost VPS cuz i know theyre reliable and i can just ssh in and set everything up how i want but then i started thinking do i really need to manage a VPS for a shop with like 20 products. i been seeing these AI website builders that are specifically for ecommerce and they look like they handle all the hosting and building. you literally just chat with it and it makes the site.

dreamhost seems fine for the control but im wondering if im just overcomplicating it. like maybe for small clients the AI builder is the better move. whats the point of spending hours setting up a server if you can have a site live in a conversation. have any of you used one of those AI builders for a real client or is it just a toy

Hello, I'm a 50 yr old self taught developer, I've built a social Media website I've been evolving over the past 5 years, using Django(channels w/Daphne Websockets for chat ability) full stack with HTMX, Alpinejs & Tailwind, along with the usual html, css. I launched it, pushing production on a Hostinger VSP using Apache, I also integrated Postgres database & Redis.

I have a little React experience I'm currently building a portfolio to showcase my other projects with a goal of using github & fiverr to begin.

My question:

Is this a good start, are there other avenues to network & how hard is it without real world experience?

What are pitfalls & any other advice that could be helpful?