I just got started in my web development course in college now but I'm really not interested in waiting another year or two to finish my prerequisites when I could be learning and making my own stuff by now. I'm learning HTML and doing pretty well. But any tips for a guy trying to get into the industry? I know CSS and JavaScript are some of the basic tools I should know and also WordPress. Any advice is appreciated? Any good online courses I could also take to speed things up a bit?

Awesome thanks for the tips!

That was really helpful. Thank you. @Charon92

The best way to learn is by doing it.

So just make sites for fun. I made a fan page for one of my favorite sports teams as practice. It was shit, so it got deleted lol. But it's practice and practice makes perfect

All right, here are pro tools you need to know for your average entry-level webdev job:

* Angular, AngularJS, React, ReactJS (and/or Knockout.js, Ember.js, <insertyourfavoriteframeworkhere>

* web security (https/authentication/authorisation/vulnerabilities OWASP..)

* the nasty insides and outs of a web browser (event propagation, event types of all kinds)

* browser compatibility, browser history, HTML5 semantics, canvas, 3D graphics, vector graphics, geolocation, local storage, cookies

* closures, promises

* CSS vendor prefixes, effects, borderbox, flexbox, sass, less, css reset, modernizr, polyfills

* responsive webdesign

* jQuery, nodeJS

* code paradigms

* pull technology variants, push technology variants

* asynchronous JS, web workers, JS prototypes, dynamic typing, ducktyping, advanced JS (scope, this,..)

* network events, websockets, client/server communication, HTTP spec

* grunt, gulp, bower

* webpack

good resources: lynda.com, https://www.codewars.com/

Try creating SPA's using a stack like MEAN or MERN. The skills to start with that you already got them.

Personally, I see no use for PHP, unless you will be working primarily on CMS, so if you want to keep practicing that, it's cool, but I advice you focus on JS technologies. If you decide Angular or React are not for you, try your hand at VueJS (the community is growing, but it's not at the same level of the other mentioned). Hell, you can even opt for JQuery, although that would be retrograde.

For UI, I recommend Bootstrap since it's really easy and it's got nice components. Don't like that? Try SemanticUI or Element., Personally, I don't like Foundation, but you can try that too.

Later you can move on to backend with langs like Java or C#, not necessarily because they're the best, but because they are widely used by companies, and haivng that skill will help when job hunting.

Best of luck and code away!

What's the interview process like? What's the day-to-day tasks you guys usually have as web developers?

@Waves582
That’s dependent on the developer,

For myself, it’s introducing new features and user flows to exisiting platforms (I work mostly in ecommerce)

I also work with offline and online systems via APis and messaging services (AWS SQS)

And on top of all that, I’m now taking up Salesforce development to add to my long list of things I can do.

This is one of those fields that it doesn’t matter where you start, because you’ll never find the end of your professional journey if you keep learning and trying new things.

I can recommend you to start a long-term project with numerous technologies in order to specify on them and getting to know them better. Personally, I'm currently working on a whole cms system with full admin dashboard, comment system, site system and widget system. This project is built with the LAMP Stack on a MVC project strucutre.

Spend some time using front end frameworks such as bootstrap, foundation and bulma as most entry level jobs will be using frameworks rather than starting from scratch in each project.