---

“It’s [Web Development] constantly changing, which can be exhausting at times but also fun to keep up with the latest innovations.”

— Vijay Pemmaraju (@hi.im.vijay) on Threads

---

We can start out by talking about web development. @hi.im.vijay how did you get into web development?

Hello! Lovely to be here and excited to answer some questions! 😊

I’ve been tinkering around with the web since I started learning how to code way back in high school. I remember helping with my school website and also working on several WordPress blogs for myself and friends/family. My first paid job in college was working on a Ruby on Rails app and I’ve pretty much professionally been doing web-related work ever since.

How did you learn to code in high school?

Like many before me, I learned to code so I could make games. I started with basic and C++, learning from books and online resources. My school also offered programming classes for C++ and Java which I took. I made games in my spare time and also attending programming competitions which were challenging and fun.

To this day, game development continues to be a strong motivator for me to hone my programming skills, and I hope to one day have a commercial release.

Awesome, are you working on a game now?

Nothing serious at the moment, but I always have a few small experiments and prototypes I’m working on on the side. Of course, dailydungeon.net continues to receive tweaks and improvements from time to time 😊

Did you build Daily Dungeon?

Yes! It was my side project from last year during the Wordle craze.

What is your go-to tech stack for a new Webapp?

Honestly, the answer to this question changes every day for me. The short answer would probably be to choose a stack I’m familiar with like React + TypeScript + tailwind + vite. If I had more room for experimentation though, I’d definitely give svelte and solidjs a try. Additionally, I’d also consider the respective server side frameworks for all of these (Next, Sveltekit, Solidstart).

What more can you say about Tailwind? Is it a replacement for Bootstrap? You are the second interviewee to bring it up?

Tailwind is one of those strange technologies that just seems kinda weird and terrible from the outside until you try it, but once you do, you never go back to writing vanilla css. For me, the ability to define styling without leaving the context of your markup is really nice.

What do you like best about working in the web development space?

It’s constantly changing, which can be exhausting at times but also fun to keep up with the latest innovations. The best part imo is the tooling; web has more innovation around tooling than any other technology sector and it’s not close. It’s partially for that reason why most of my games are built for the web.

For someone new to web development, what do you mean by tooling?

Everything related to spinning up a web server in development, writing code, hot reloading, running tests, cicd, deployments, etc.

For someone just looking to get started in web development, how would you recommend someone get started?

Learn JavaScript, and then TypeScript. Don’t learn any framework until you are comfortable with JavaScript. Those skills will translate to any web development work in the future regardless of the framework (of course assuming that JavaScript never goes away in the wake of WebAssembly)

What are your favorite resources to stay up to date on all things web development? Blogs? Videos? Anything?

All sorts of things, really. I’m subscribed to a few web dev related subreddits and also read most of what floats up to the top of hacker news that’s relevant to web dev. I also watch a lot of @theprimeagen’s content.

How can people find you elsewhere online?

You can find me right here on threads, of course! My personal website (under renovation currently) is vijay.io

Thanks for the great questions @ryan.swanstrom! I had a wonderful time answering them 😊

Here is the full interview (note: the numbers got mixed up and this is accidentally numbered 8 on Threads): @ryan.swanstrom • Threads Dev Interview #8 I am finding developers on Threads and interviewing them, right here on … • Threads