Develop Yourself

The ONLY Project You Need to Build to Become a Software Developer in 2026

• Brian Jenney

Share episode

I lay out the project with tons of resources right here 👇

https://brianjenney.medium.com/your-learning-roadmap-to-become-a-software-developer-2e15e1ce1e22


Send us a text

Shameless Plugs

Free 5 day email course to go from HTML to AI

Got a question you want answered on the pod? Drop it here

Apply for 1 of 12 spots at Parsity - Learn to build complex software, work with LLMs and launch your career.

AI Bootcamp (NEW) - for software developers who want to be the expert on their team when it comes to integrating AI into web applications.

SPEAKER_00:

Welcome to the Develop Yourself podcast, where we teach you everything you need to land your first job as a software developer by learning to develop yourself, your skills, your network, and more. I'm Brian, your host. If you want to become a software developer in 2026, I really encourage you to stop obsessing over the tech stack. It's really easy to figure out what to learn nowadays. You can go to parsity.io or any other coding bootcamp, download the syllabus, and that'll probably give you a good idea of what you should study that would make you somewhat hireable in the market. But it's a lot more to it than just learning a handful of technologies in the right order and just kind of stacking them together and hoping that somebody actually hires you. The problem really is that beginners don't know what they should build in order to learn the skills that make them hireable. So let me make something really clear. You don't learn the skills first and then build the projects. The project is what should teach you the skill. The project I'm gonna outline for you is basically gonna be your curriculum. We're gonna outline a project that has four phases to it, which is everything you need to learn front-end, back end, databases, deployment, cloud, AI. And you're gonna learn this stuff by building, breaking, rebuilding, and shipping a single evolving project. That's right, project. I want to also be very clear here that this project is not going to get you hired. No one's gonna want to probably see this at all, or maybe they will, but there's a big misconception in tech that if you just build the right thing or the right portfolio, you're going to get hired. In reality, no one really cares about your portfolio project. That doesn't mean you don't need to build something. The whole point of what we're going to build, what I'm going to outline for you here, is so that you can get the skills, the transferable skills that are going to make you efficient and actually be able to work as a software developer. This is going to give you the minimum effective dose of technical skill needed to have a foundation to actually be hireable. But being hired is a whole other separate bag of worms, and we can get into that in other episodes. And I've talked extensively about that. And that's honestly why programs like Parsity exist in the first place. If it was as easy as just telling you go learn this, then people would just go learn that thing and we'd have a lot more software developers, but we don't. So stage one, you're going to build and deploy a static website that looks good on mobile. This is really important. Your first job is not building some complex app, it's just to prove you can put together something really basic to get yourself a schedule you can stick to, make a website, style it, make it look decent, right? And then just get it online somewhere. That's literally it. Now, that's it, is a bit misleading, right? Because this is going to be difficult. You should be learning VS Code, HTML and CSS, responsive design, some CSS, and then maybe some tailwind or even Bootstrap. I know the Bootstrap's old and out of favor, but it doesn't really matter. It's kind of the same thing. So learn Tailwind or learn Bootstrap or learn both and figure out how to integrate this into the janky web page you're going to build. And then deploy this thing on GitHub pages so that everybody can look at your terrible looking app. And at this point, this can be like the most lame portfolio ever. It can just be like an about you and some pictures of your cat or something like that or your kids, whatever. Just something. Just get something out there. And most importantly, have it look good on mobile. This is going to teach you responsive design, which is something I noticed a lot of boot camps and in general, younger developers don't seem to understand because I've seen a lot of your portfolios. And when I do this, they break spectacularly. You don't want to be that person. So the resources to learn this stuff are really simple. Code Academy, learn HTML and CSS Basics, Scrimba if you want to use that as well, but you don't need to. Download VS Code. It is the code editor that all of us use in professional software teams. And then also read up on the Tailwind documentation and the Bootstrap documentation. And lastly, for a book, you might want to consider buying You Don't Know JavaScript Up and Going by Kyle Simpson. Kyle Simpson has a whole catalog of books in this series of You Don't Know JS, because you know you don't know JS. Read it. This could introduce you to some basic concepts and just help you understand this language, or go to a program like Dev30, which we run once a quarter, will teach you well beyond the basics of JavaScript and get you into a place where you can actually build software. All right, stage two. You're going to add interactivity to this web page with JavaScript and local storage. So once you understand how to actually make a page, you want to make it do something. JavaScript essentially enables interactivity on a web page. You click a button and that button does something. Maybe it moves a div around the screen. Maybe it submits a form. Maybe it's what happens when you click a like on somebody's picture on Instagram or something like that, and you see the little heart explode or something like that. This typically is achieved through JavaScript. HTML and CSS are just like the stuff you just see. When you click on stuff and things happen, this is JavaScript. JavaScript allows you to interact with data over the web. It allows you to add button controls and clicks and things like that and handle events that might happen on a typical web page, which would be clicking something, submitting a form, all sorts of other stuff that you're used to doing when you're on a page. It's very rare you'll ever go to a site that has no interactivity. These just don't exist now. So here's where your project actually starts to form. What I highly suggest you build is a social feed, a miniature social media app. So you should be able to upload a picture, add a caption to that picture, add comments under the posts, delete the posts, and save all this in local storage. Local storage is like the database that comes in your browser. You can store stuff in there. It's not secure, it's not safe, it's not scalable. You can't make a real app that just uses local storage, or at least you shouldn't. But this will give you some experience with persisting data and a little bit about the browser APIs. So this will teach you DOM manipulation. DOM means the document object model, very fancy word for the stuff you see on the screen. Also teach you how to render a list, event handling, persistence, and you still don't need a database. To learn this stuff, keep using Code Academy, go through JavaScript fundamentals, maybe go through the JavaScript path on Scrimba, and then put your project up on GitHub pages. Make sure you're adding towards that project on GitHub and then updating it so when people go to that site, they see the refreshed version. And it doesn't matter if you have stuff up there right now. Also, if it's in local storage in your machine, it won't show up on somebody else's browser, which is kind of cool. So you don't have to worry about like your personal data being exposed in this way. This is just for practice. This is not a real app that you'd really want people to see. It's just giving you that foundation. And at this point for the books, continue reading Kyle Simpson's book, Up and Going with JavaScript. And I think that's likely enough for you to keep reading at this point. There's also a site called javascript.info. Really, really good site. Of course, use MDN docs, of course, use ChatGPT. But honestly, I would really not use a ton of AI at this point. In fact, for your coding, you should be using zero AI. That's not gonna help you learn these fundamentals. So don't use AI at all. Let me make this really, really simple for you. Don't use AI. It's not gonna help you actually learn to code. This is gonna make you think that you know how to code because it will produce all your code for you. All right, now stage three, you're gonna rebuild this exact same project using React and Next.js. Now that you kind of understand what you're building, you've learned a little bit of JavaScript, you've done some things to learn how to make interactivity happen, and you've even been able to save something to local storage. Next, you're ready to jump into a framework. And if you really are stuck, like, do I know enough JavaScript? I have a challenge that I'll have in the show notes that you can take and see if you can pass this form challenge, basically building a form with JavaScript, HTML, and CSS. Then I'd say yes, absolutely, you're ready to move on to the next section. Now, rebuilding something you've already built is a really nice way to reinforce your learning and also make sure that you're not spending too much time trying to figure out what I should build next. This is just like a surface area you can keep expanding for your own learning opportunities. You can expand this project and go well beyond what I'm asking you to do here, but this is the minimum effective dose of technologies and projects that I think you should be doing. So now you're moving on to React and Next.js. This will teach you how to build with components, how to handle things like state, routing, the ideas of client versus server components. This is modern front-end architecture. Next.js and React are the most popular frameworks and library that you can use, but there's Angular, there's Vue, there's whatever else came out the last few years that people are still using. All these frameworks are kind of the same. They use component-based architecture. They generally abstract a lot of the really difficult parts of building a website, a multi-page website, by having a bunch of JavaScript that is doing the heavy lifting for you in the background and giving you all sorts of cool tools to do things like support routing, support API requests, do database logic for you. It basically just makes building a really complex web app much simpler, or to some people, maybe makes it more complicated. But either way, you're gonna have to know this stuff. So rebuilding that same exact app and having it do the exact same thing within this framework is gonna teach you a lot about how it used to work and what are the benefits and some of the pitfalls of using these frameworks. Resources here is the Next.js official documentation. Their docs are pretty good. React.dev also has amazing documentation. CodeCademy for React Basics, Scrimpa actually has a really good React course that I've heard nothing but really good things about from students at Parsity. Yes, we make our own curriculum at Parsity. Sometimes people choose to use other curriculum too. I'm not as like emotionally attached to the curriculum as I used to be. My big thing is the projects that we give students in Parsity are much more valuable and the feedback from senior engineers that we give them way more valuable than like this is the exact curriculum you should follow. So learn enough to actually do the thing, right? And for the books now that you should be reading, I think the next book in your catalog here should be clean code in JavaScript because you're likely doing all this in JavaScript. Now, let's say you want to learn Python or C sharp or Rust or something like that. I would wait. I would really pump the brakes on it. And I have seen people suggesting that newer developers learn like a really strong programming language, like C sharp or C or even Rust. I'm against that from just being completely honest with you. I think it's a really quick way to burn out and to also feel really, really lost and stuck. And is this gonna make you slow down to a crawl? Learn JavaScript, learn TypeScript, and then jump into other programming languages, would be the way I would do it. And that'd be the way I would teach people that are close to me that I want to see succeed. That's the way I'd want them to do it. Stage four, databases and authentication. This is where your application becomes real. This is also where stuff tends to get a little more conceptual and fuzzy for some people. Some people like the front end, they can see stuff happen, they get pretty lost in the back end. I have another repository, a challenge that you can access in the show notes that's gonna teach you the basics of making API routes with Node and Express. I think you're gonna find that pretty useful. No videos, just straight up coding, get in there, work on it. It's gonna teach you a heck of a lot more than staring at a video for a long time. So now you're going to replace local storage with a real database. I would use SQL or Mongo, doesn't really matter. Add authentication, add user accounts, allow private versus public pages, allow invitations. This is a lot of features I'm asking you to add in here. But if you can do this, you're gonna learn a whole lot about how to make modern web applications and some of the basic features you're gonna see across most web apps that you're using, right? Think about any social media app you've used. You can typically privatize your page, make it public, you can invite people, you have some sort of authentication to get to your account. So this is a lot of stuff to learn. And this can feel a bit overwhelming if I'm being honest. I strongly recommend learning SQL, and I'll also have some resources in the show notes to learn that, by the way, and MongoDB. But if you only can learn one and you're kind of stuck for time, just learn SQL. It's the most popular database choice out there, with Mongo being number two, right? And even though most boot camps teach Mongo, SQL is actually simpler to learn. I think you're gonna find it a lot easier to grok than learning Mongo, which is really strange. So learning Mongo counterintuitively is more difficult, even though most boot camps teach Mongo. So with this database and having this authentication layer, you should actually have a fairly working app. Like a user should be able to go in there, they should be able to post a picture, they should be able to have this picture stored in database, they should be able to delete this image, they should be able to add comments, they should be able to delete comments, add likes, all the kind of stuff that a normal application would allow you to do. And if you're using Next.js, you can actually have all your back end code and logic in the same exact app. Now, we're gonna break this apart soon, but this is a good place to start. I don't know if I would deploy a separate Node Express app at this point. It might be more difficult. So just sticking with Next.js and having all your server side logic and your client side logic in the same place seems fine for now. And for the books you're reading, just continue with clean code and JavaScript. And if you want to get a little bit deeper, there's a really good novel that I like that'll teach you a lot about DevOps. It's called The Phoenix Project. Really good book. This is a book you could read at night before you go to bed, and it's actually a story. It's a fictional story, but it actually teaches you a lot about modern software practices. Now for stage five, you're gonna deploy this backend to the cloud. And remember all that logic that we said was going to live in your Next.js app, all the routes that were going to enable you to communicate with the database and support all the liking and deleting and all that stuff. This is what we call CRUD create, read, update, delete. If you can support that with your Node Express routes or within the back end portion of your Next.js app, great. What we're gonna do now is we're gonna move all that to the cloud. And I highly recommend using AWS, Amazon Web Services. You can also use Google Cloud Provider, they both have free tiers. I would use AWS because AWS is what the majority of large companies and small companies use. Most people just use AWS. It's also gonna teach you a heck of a lot more than getting some certificate. Now you're gonna have some actual practical experience building within Amazon Web Services. At a minimum, you want to be able to store the images in S3. S3 stands for secure scalable storage, I think. Get it, S3. You want to have your back end, basically those routes that will talk to your database. You want to have those exposed via AWS in something called a Lambda. These are basically servers that you pay for only when they're on. Again, there's a free tier here. Lambdas are going to be the simplest way for you to deploy this stuff. There's tons of resources on this, including one that I've added in the show notes. Give you a lot of resources here. So you should be able to configure environment variables as well. You should be able to have some permissions as well using something called IAM. This is the authentication service that AWS offers. They have all these funny names, but I am is the name of this service. This ensures that only people that are in your app or use a certain API key or something like that can actually talk to your database. Because if anybody can talk to your database, that's a big security risk. So what you want to do instead is have some sort of authentication, some sort of person in the middle, a man in the middle or a woman in the middle that's saying, Hey, you can't talk to this database. I need to check who you are, what IP address you're coming from, what is the URL that you're coming from, making sure you don't just be able to make sure you're not able to just take user data, right? So this is not that important at this stage. This is again over-engineering things, just so this is not that important at this stage, but we're over-engineering. We're basically adding more complexity than we need just so you can learn stuff. That's totally fine to do. You should be over-engineering things, adding complexity, doing things that aren't necessary, so you can provide a path for you to learn. Now, AWS has all sorts of documentation. A lot of it kind of sucks. This is where I might lean more on AI to tell me, hey, here's the bug I'm getting, here's the error I'm getting, how do I do this? What do I set up? Take screenshots, reach out to people maybe in your network that might know AWS. It gives you something really good to write about on LinkedIn too, if you're going to share this journey in public. And a lot of people out there have used AWS and they understand how difficult it can be to use. So you'll get a lot of people saying, Oh, do this or do that. So there's tons of information and people. So you should be able to actually be able to do this project. And again, the resources in the show notes will walk you through a project where you will do exactly this. Now, this last step, this is something that is fairly new. And I don't hear a lot of people talking about this. AI integration is now becoming a baseline skill. It's quickly, it's quickly becoming the new full stack skill that most companies now want you to know how to use, that most companies will kind of expect you to have some knowledge of. And what does AI integration mean? It can be really complex or it can be really, really simple. So here's a feature I think you might want to add to this social media app. Make an AI companion or some little button or something like that that can generate images based on the caption, or maybe it generates captions based on the image, or maybe it gives you a suggestion for the kind of post you want to do or something like that, or maybe it summarizes the content that you've written, or maybe it's like a filter that makes sure that the comments you're writing aren't too mean. That could be a pretty cool feature, actually. Making sure that people don't write super duper mean comments and like leaving a rating or something next to the comment if it sounds like really mean or really nice or something like that, like different emojis for that. That could be a really cool feature, actually. So, what you're gonna need to do to do this is basically call a large language model. OpenAI is the company that makes Chat GPT, and they expose the logic that makes Chat GPT work through an API. What you're gonna do from your web application, from the front end or from the back end, wherever you choose to do this from, it doesn't really matter, is you're going to take some data, maybe a text from your web app, you're gonna send that information to OpenAI. And usually you would type something into Chat GPT and it would give you a response. You're gonna do this programmatically. You're gonna send this request over the wire to their API, and their API is gonna return you a response that you'll show on the screen. Maybe that will be emojis, maybe that will be like a score of one to 10 of how mean is this, or something like that. Or maybe it'll say, you can't write this post because it is way too edgy, too mean, too edge lordy. We're not gonna let you write this bucko. Get out of here. But this is the bare minimum when it comes to AI integration that you really should know. Basically, how to use an off-the-shelf model like OpenAI and programmatically interact with it in your web application, in the back end or the front end, doesn't matter. Your resources here, of course. I have a little challenge for you below. I make so many challenges because I really like doing this kind of stuff. So take the challenge. Hopefully, it's not overwhelming for you to do, but there's not much out there as far as AI integration right now. So there's not a lot of players in this space that are making stuff for people that are learning JavaScript, TypeScript, React, Next.js. So I've made something for you. Check it out. Go to OpenAI's documentation as well. And Gemini is another free option for using a large language model because OpenAI is not free at all, but Gemini is. So use Gemini, check it out. If you don't want to spend the five bucks in OpenAI, that could be a good alternative. So, my strong opinion, you don't really need more than this. You've got some books under your belt, you have a really good project under your belt, and you've done something that most developers don't do, which is deploy a full stack application using AWS, React, Next.js, and actually have some AI integrations into it. This is beyond the scope of what most boot camps are teaching, and honestly, what most developers who I speak to who are on the job hunt are doing in the first place. So this is a very complex project. This should take you anywhere between six months to 12 months. I really have no idea. It depends on where you're starting and how you're doing this and how likely you are to get sidetracked. I've met a lot of people that have gone down the self-taught route that I've talked to two, three, four years later, five years later sometimes, and they're basically still learning stuff. I want you to avoid that by trying to keep your scope very narrow and tight to make sure you're actually getting closer to the finish line and not just getting closer to another tutorial. And by the way, I kind of already went over the tech stack, but just to really nail it home, it's not that crazy. You don't need to watch a bunch more videos about what tech stack should I learn in 2026, HTML, CSS, Tailwind, JavaScript, TypeScript, React, Next.js, Node.js, Express, TypeScript, SQL, Postgres, or MySQL, MongoDB, maybe AWS, potentially GCP, OpenAI for AI, maybe Gemini is a good free alternative. And for tooling, VS Code, and you might notice I didn't say Python or Java or C sharp or whatever. And these very well could be really, really important for you to learn in your market. I think you start with this list of stuff first, and then you add on something at the end. You can use this same plan and then go back and rip apart that API layer, that back end part, and just replace it with Java and then deploy that on AWS or with Python or with C sharp or with Rust. It doesn't really matter. At this point, you have something that you can play with. You have a nice canvas that you can use to learn whatever the hell you want. I really hope that you enjoy the resources that are below. And obviously, if you want a well manicured path and not just the technical skills, but how to actually get hired, which is why I suspect your EV. Listening to this in the first place, just go to parsity.io. Anyway, pitch over. Hope that's helpful. I'll see you around. That'll do it for today's episode of the Develop Yourself podcast. If you're serious about switching careers and becoming a software developer and building complex software and want to work directly with me and my team, go to Parsity.io. And if you want more information, feel free to schedule a chat by just clicking the link in the show notes. See you next week.

Podcasts we love

Check out these other fine podcasts recommended by us, not an algorithm.