Active forum/chat for web development talk?

[Guest]

I'm wondering if you folks can recommend (form personal experience) message boards like ours here or chat channels (IRC, Slack, Gitter, Discord etc.) on the topic of web development in general.

Diving back into the topic, I find it's hard to get a handle on good modern practices. I'd love to find people to talk to until I know which concepts and tools to invest time in. So far, I've tried IRC (channels seem dead) and a bit of Discord and Reddit, but with limited success. There's a lot of narrowly focused discussion, but nothing more general for those that have an objective but aren't sure about ways to accomplish it.

[catacombs]

/r/webdev seems to be what you're looking for, so I'm surprised you didn't have luck on Reddit. Web Development is also broad. Are you interested in front- or back-end work? Design, databases or APIs?

[Guest]

Ok, I'll give that a shot. I'm interested both in front- and backend. For the frontend my main question was what to use to compose an interactive UI. From what I understand, React.js is very popular and probably well suited for such tasks. My knowledge is from a time when jQuery was the hype (though I didn't use it much either), and these modern stateful frameworks didn't exist. For the backend the situation is clearer for me and I mostly have questions about which standards to use (e.g. for authentication), not which languages or frameworks.

[catacombs]

I'll give that a shot. I'm interested both in front- and backend.

/r/webdev is definitely for you then. That subreddit covers both topics.

For the frontend my main question was what to use to compose an interactive UI. From what I understand, React.js is very popular and probably well suited for such tasks.

You're right React.js is a very popular framework. There's also Angular.js, Svelte.js and Vue.js, it depends on what the job is and what you're willing to learn.

If I had to pick, Vue would be a good introduction to reactive UI development. A lot of companies are starting use tools outside React.

For the backend the situation is clearer for me and I mostly have questions about which standards to use (e.g. for authentication), not which languages or frameworks.

The subreddit will likely have answers. Definitely use the search bar.