I think Webdev is the best "Anchor Point" in Software Development

Introduction

In the ocean of software development, there are many ways to develop a software. In majority of cases a software is developed for popular operating systems like Windows, Mac, Linux, Android, iOS, etc. and a huge amount of software these days are made to work within the confines of a popular application software found across all devices and operating systems. Yes, I'm talking about a web browser.

Over the years, web has evolved from a bunch of utility focused text-based websites to now supporting full-fledged applications that does more than just showing text, audio, and video. We have powerful web applications for building beautiful vector art, editing videos, playing 2d and 3d games (to an extent), and a lot more, though some of the examples I mentioned may not be as great as their desktop counterparts, but those gaps will most likely be overcome in coming years. With that said, if we exclude heavyweight webapps and just think about simple text/audio/video based websites, then those consitutes the majority of digital software ecosystem across the world.

Pretty much all businesses and professionals need some form of website and majority of them are built using HTML/CSS/JS. But what about mobile apps? Well that is also achievable by using web's language of JavaScript with the help of React Native. And it's here that I'd like to venture into web development and talk about why webdev is the best anchor point to cover huge surface area of software development effectively with least amount of effort, resulting in versatility in picking up new types of technologies (no I'm not talking about N different JS frameworks).

Before proceeding ahead...

1. I would like to point out that here I'm specifically talking about software development, so I won't be touching AI/ML as it's a completely different thing. Whereas, LLM which is a product of ML is consumed by developers for code-assist and I do talk about it, but still it doesn't fall under software development as some kind of standalone process, so I didn't included AI/ML in this blog and the main image that I created.
2. And one more thing, I will be using the term JavaScript to represent cases where TypeScript should actually be used (because TS > JS). But using JS only to make the reading experience better, because I'm not good with words and end up rambling a lot.

Why Webdev is a Great Anchor Point?

You can either be a generalist or a specialist. But what if you can be both? Meaning, try to be master of one and jack of all trades (of course you can be master of N many things, and create a pyramid like skill structure).

The strength of web development (both frontend and backend) is that it ends up covering nearly most of the software domains out there. Here are the things that allows web development to be a great anchor point -

1. JavaScript

JavaScript with the help of TypeScript has made building web apps, desktop apps, and mobile apps so much convenient. For building websites, we can of course use the vanilla JS or choose any one of the many available JS frameworks with the most popular being React. Talking of React, if you want to build applications for mobile devices, then React Native has got you covered. Similarly, for desktop apps you can go with Electron. Or maybe you want to have your own server and add some Rest APIs to it, well then, you can use JavaScript there too. So you see, having a common language makes its learnt knowledge useful in so many different domains. With that said, one should definetely try out new languages to get an idea of different paradigms and enlighten oneself with new way of thinking.

2. Third-Party Support

JavaScript being so popular means that companies that provide part of their software as a service in the form of SDKs and Tools will always be supporting JavaScript, so that means you don't have to spend time creating your own implementation or a wrapper if the language is not supported. This is something I realized when I tried integrating Firebase into my Godot game engine project. So a couple of services were possible to implement using beautiful and simple Rest APIs, but others weren't and it was here that an SDK was required to be added in the project. But unfortunately there was no support for Godot, and only solution was to create some sort of wrapper. As such I ended up creating my own backend, as at that time finding resources for building wrapper was kinda boring and time consuming (software equivalent of bad bureaucracy). Though now things might be different due to LLMs like ChatGPT and others. But either way its still an unnecessary obstacle in many scenarios, and having a language or framework that is well supported always makes life so much easier.

3. Standardization

The standards and specifications for web browsers are well established and all browser implementations have to follow them. This in a way makes websites cross-platform, making web content available on any Laptop, Mobile, TV, Console, etc. Not just that, but the level of backwards compatibility is great and many old websites continue to render great. In comparison, one of my very first game that I made in Unity game engine back in 2019, and when I played it again in 2025, it shows the in-game texts in jumbled unreadable way. And its only a mere difference of 6 years and one version of Windows from 10 to 11.

Talking of Unity, it doesn't support correct rendering of many Indian languages (last time checked in 2023, not sure the current state). Thankfully, Godot soon added support (I think way before v4) despite having any or basically no demand by community to add support for Indian languages. In Unity's case, part of the reason there was an issue in the first place is because of custom rendering engine used in Unity. Same's the case with Godot, but at least they worked on the issue and fixed it. Similar issues can be found in Flutter. However, React Native allows us to use JavaScript as a bridge language and directly call OS level methods, which means no custom drawing. I'd like to point out though that for game engines its generally a good idea to have custom-rendering implementation for better performance.

Well I got a little off-tangent.

So if you wanna avoid all these OS level issues, you can for sure try React Native, or if you're in hurry just go with web and let the browser do its job, as most operating systems have a browser in it, and all browsers are implemented based on specified web standards, which all of them have to follow.

4. AI (LLM) benefits Webdevs

Whether it is the huge amount of HTML, CSS, JS data out there on Interent that helps LLM provide better up-to-date answers, or these AI code-editors that will work best with text-based programming (a disadvantge in game-engines with heavy GUI and its non-XML asset formats, that are pretty much non-existant on Internet because why would anyone talk about it other than only Git repos having access to them, and that's still a very scarce amount of data for training LLMs). This is why LLMs works best with popular languages like JavaScript and Python due to their large ecosystem and community. So not Python alone, but JavaScript too takes the benefit here.

Conclusion

So yeah that's it, the reason why I believe web development to be a great anchor point. You can pick a framework say React on frontend, and another on backend (doesn't have to be JS-based, could be Python too as its better for AI/ML support, or maybe Golang, C#, Java, and many more). Go deep and gain an expertise on both frontend and backend. In parallel, try experimenting out with different technologies like AI, LLMs, IoT, etc. basically whatever grasps your interest. And eventually you will have to present that information or maybe store it somewhere, then you're gonna be needing the knowledge of webdev (frontend and backend) to carry out that process. So if your anchor is set somewhere else, no worries, but if you wanna gain more knowledge and stay up-to-date then try to pull off another anchor in webdev space, to have a basic idea of what's going on in webdev ecosystem and in the process you can easily get a look at other domains and work on them if you want, as they will most probably be supporting JavaScript in some way or another.

Thank You

So yeah that's all from my side. I haven't added a comment section yet, but will add soon, so I can know your opinions on blogs I post, including this one. Thanks for reading this far, and have a great day ahead! 😃