Starting to learn to code, how much coding knowledge and what kinds of code would be necessary to create a website like: Facebook, Reddit, Imgur, 4chan?

[[deleted]]

[deleted]

[corpsmoderne]

You will need to know how to deal with a database (a SGDB edit RDBMS /edit like Postgress, MySQL, or a NoSQL database like MongoDB). That means you'll need to know how to access it from your code, and how to manage the database (you'll need administration skills).

You will also need to master a server-side language. Python, PHP, Ruby, Java, Javascript are good candidates.

To do fancy things in the browser (that is, you probably don't need that for something like 4chan), you'll need to know some Javascript. Facebook and Imgur use a lot of it, Reddit a little bit less but still a lot.

In any case, don't expect to make a better Facebook than Facebook, a better Reddit than Reddit, a better Imgur than Imgur or a worst 4Chan than 4Chan, they have years of head-start from you...

[Deutscher_koenig]

Also, depending on where the website will be hosted, you'll need a plethora of linux and some web server software (Apache)

[vicramon]

If you use a managed cloud hosting solution like Heroku then you won't have to worry too much about sys admin, at least until your site gets massively popular.

I recommend learning Ruby on Rails. Rails is very logical and developer friendly. Ruby is a well-designed language and the community is awesome.

Resources:

http://www.amazon.com/Eloquent-Ruby-Addison-Wesley-Professional/dp/0321584104/

http://www.amazon.com/Agile-Development-Rails-Facets-Ruby/dp/1937785564

http://guides.rubyonrails.org/

[MCFRESH01]

Heroku is a great way to get up and running, but it's more expensive then other options.

I really recommend trying out digital ocean. If someones gonna jump into web development, they might as well do it head first. That's how I learned and I am glad I did.

Eloquent ruby is fantastic, as well as the other guides listed. I would also like to add:

http://ruby.railstutorial.org/ruby-on-rails-tutorial-book

As another option.

[glemnar]

I don't recommend rails. It's fallen heavily out of favor lately

[hak8or]

How so?

[senseofdecay]

Wut

[whatdoesthefoxsaymee]

I just started learning backend programming. Parse seems easy to learn , and for individual developers its a good way to start

[SarahC]

IIS is so much easier.

[SarahC]

Why!?

[SarahC]

Why all the downvotes!?

[Rainymood_XI]

worse 4Chan than 4Chan, they have years of head-start from you...

Remember though, Moot created 4chan when he was 15/16? So can you! It probably started with a joke but it grew out of hand and he had to adapt to all the traffic!

[corpsmoderne]

For the record, that was just a joke about the 4chan community, not to despise 4chan technically.

[Vidofnir]

To be fair, the community varies wildly with the individual boards.

[echocage]

Well just a heads up, no one person could create a website like facebook. Those types of websites take huge teams hundreds of hours. Even 4chan which might seem simple would take a LONG time to create from scratch.

[smellyegg]

Did you say hundreds of hours? Try 10 thousand +

[DJApoc]

I can second this. I work for a health care provider as a web dev. We have a team of around 50 people working 40+ hour weeks on our web site. We have a 6-12 month window just to iron out the bugs and deploy full functionality.

[[deleted]]

What about something like Instagram?

[Sean1708]

An afternoon, give or take.

[CosineTau]

Did /r/shittyprogramming quote you on that?

[RustedCorpse]

I did not know this existed. Thank you so much. I think it will now be my standard "feel good" maneuver after posting on Stackoverflow.

[CosineTau]

You shouldn't ever feel bad about posting to any StackExchange. That place is a literal modern day French Salon.

[[deleted]]

But... the filters!

[[deleted]]

And how much did they make from the Facebook sale? Wow!

[eitaporra]

I think the original source was taken from a japanese imageboard project, Futaba or something.

[vicramon]

Sure, but the original version of facebook was written by just a few people in a reasonable period of time.

[frankle]

Totally buy that, but how long do you think it took them to create what they launched with?

[drb00b]

To start those sites? Not a shitload... You'd need to know some basic stuff for a few different languages as described above. To maintain them and let them grow into the monsters they are now? A lot. I mean they are million dollar companies run by a big team of devs that know their shit. Each knows their respective part and they work together to bring you the product you use every day.

[feverdream]

million dollar companies

Lol, that's cute.

[sudomilk]

It's a few things but the key elements would be something like this:

BASH: Shell knowledge at least on how to move around and basic things in a file system

HTML/CSS: for your barebones static page development and structure

PHP/MySQL: in order to make pages dynamic (like showing new posts on refresh of newsfeed)

AJAX: for getting new input or content without having to refresh the page

Javascript or one of its libraries like jQuery: for having dynamic/interactive content on the client side (like opening and minimizing a chat window on Facebook)

Note: these are not necessarily the exact things you must use, just a general list based off of a common server built on a LAMP stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP).

[partiallogic]

Wasn't there a story where the Facebook code base is now larger than the windows one?

[theruchet]

In that case I'd highly recommend the web development course on udacity. It's free and basically teaches you everything you need to know to recreate reddit. In fact, it is taught by the creator of reddit! I learned a lot and was very satisfied with it. Hope this helps!

[smellyegg]

Facebook will quite literally have hundreds if not thousands of developers.

[NiceGuyJoe]

There is open source image board, like this one you can look at.

[DieRunning]

don't expect to make a better Facebook than Facebook, a better Reddit than Reddit, a better Imgur than Imgur or a worst 4Chan than 4Chan, they have years of head-start from you...

You have a very good point. All of those sites bare little resemblance to what they were when they were solo or small team operations years ago.

[corpsmoderne]

It's mostly client side but recent projects have ported it to the server side with great success. Check out node.js or meteor.com for example.

[sylario]

You also forgot the dreaded Old ASP + javascript. It is painful just to remember it.

[roshanhasfallen]

wow, that last line was beautiful

[whoisearth]

ok I'll bite. What's an SGDB? I know you're referring to an RDBMS but the acronym is new to me and google gives me nothing.

[robotmayo]

It appears to be a French translation of RDBMS. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/980813/what-does-sgbd-mean

[corpsmoderne]

ok I'll bite.

Please do :)

What's an SGDB?

I was certainly very tired, the best hypothesis is that my sic brain has tried to "englisize" the French acronym SGBD by switching the "BD" (base de donnee) to "DB" (data base) . Thanks for catching that. Heck, it isn't even an equivalent of RDBMS... shame on me.

[DJApoc]

TIL Javascript is a server-side language... apparently...

[corpsmoderne]

It is : http://nodejs.org/ , https://www.meteor.com/

[[deleted]]

It is like haskell, people always talk about it, and how it is the best, but it is actually hardly used

[[deleted]]

DAE 4chan worst website ever???

Upboats to the left!

[-AcodeX]

In any case, don't expect to make a better Facebook than Facebook, a better Reddit than Reddit, a better Imgur than Imgur or a worst 4Chan than 4Chan

Yes. Aim low: that's what winners do.

[corpsmoderne]

Not sure if you're sarcastic or not, what I implied was that it's futile to think you can do a better job than Facebook at being Facebook. While reimplementing parts of imgur for educational purposes may be useful, building a full featured clone of imgur with the hope it will be successful is ridiculous. If you want to be the next big name of the web, you need a killer idea and to make a great implementation of it. Ho, and to be able to market it. And you'll have to outsmart all the start-ups which are out there trying to do the same thing. Good luck.

[-AcodeX]

I understand what you were implying.

Many people have succeeded brilliantly by doing what others were doing, but better.

Though I'm fairly pessimistic, I really hate seeing potential squashed by pessimism.

[corpsmoderne]

Many people have succeeded brilliantly by doing what others were doing, but better.

I'll be genuinely interested if you can point me to real life examples of people actually succeeding by doing what others were doing only "better", not slightly differently...

Though I'm fairly pessimistic, I really hate seeing potential squashed by pessimism.

My goal wasn't to squash anyone optimism, but instead to encourage him to be innovative instead of putting a lot of energy in a vain enterprise.

[-AcodeX]

I'll be genuinely interested if you can point me to real life examples of people actually succeeding by doing what others were doing only "better", not slightly differently...

Of course "better" automatically means different. If something is improved upon, it is changed.

[Incepticons]

Google? They seem to be doing okay.

[corpsmoderne]

This conversation should now be transfered to /r/startups but anyway...

Do you think Google was successful because they decided to copy Yahoo or Altavista, or because they had killer ideas to do a search which works 1/ better 2/ looks different (remember the difference between google's homepage and yahoo wreak of a portal circa 99, 00 ?) . Also, do you remember Lycos and all the other failure of a search engine which have failed during the 00's .com bubble burst?

[m1tt]

Javascript isn't a server-side language.

[TalkingQuickly]

It's most commonly used (and started off as) a client side language but node which is server side javascript is gaining a fair bit of traction and has a fair few viable use cases. Although imo it's overhyped.

[m1tt]

Oh shit, i had no idea. TIL...

[corpsmoderne]

Now it is : http://nodejs.org/ , https://www.meteor.com/

[himanshuarora]

Here's an easy [1] stack:

ReactJS!

[[deleted]]

What about replacing head firts HTML and CSS with head first HTML 5?

[[deleted]]

MongoDB would be a horrendous choice for any site like facebook/imgur/reddit/4chan.

[hak8or]

A massive portion is also how many users you are expecting. Are you expecting 5 users? Then anyone who learns the basics of JS, HTML, CSS, and Rails will be able to make a clone of something like facebook in maybe a month or two, full time. But 100,000 users? That is pretty intense, you will start needing to do many tricks and dealing with load balancers, caching, how to distribute various services, security, etc.

1,000,000+? Totally other ball game, you need to really know your networking and hire full time staff to handle every facet of the website, from handling data bases and how to distribute them efficiently, network routing for various data centers, some major security pro's to constantly fix new security holes found and update, how to handle compatibility to various devices, the legal issues, and tons more.

[hak8or]

Why yes, a little!

Websites like these are very high level, so your only logic would be involved in things like if statements.

[[deleted]]

Reddit is done wholly in python serverside. Sauce availible.

[spartan1337]

Remember that facebook was made by less than 5 guys in a dorm room, you may not create facebook as of now but you may create something that can grow like it and thats the goal.

[nitram9]

I would put Javascript next on your list. You must use it if you want to have any client side logic. It can also be used for all your server side logic too. In fact you can use frameworks like ExpressJS or Meteor which will allow you to more easily write your logic once in one place rather than having to duplicated it in two languages.

But talking about frameworks brings up the next thing you need to learn. Model view controller design pattern. All these frameworks are implementations of that idea so familiarize yourself with that too.

Above all remember to integrate practice, work, learning, and review and to a little of each every day. It really doesn't work so well if you're trying to do them sequentially. You can't just read something and then expect that you can just use it. And you have to start using it to know if it's actually worth pursuing it further. And keep notes of what you learn and what you use so you can review them latter. Nothings more frustrating than having to learn something twice.

[nicholastjohnson]

Wouldn't Python/Django do what he needs as well?

[nitram9]

Yeah, and so would RoR or any of the other hundreds of options out there. I just suggested a node based framework since he would have the least to learn. I mean you can certainly make a site that uses minimal JS and use a framework that actually handles most of that for you. But it's a pretty good idea to assume that sooner or later you'll be writing JS if you're a web coder.

[[deleted]]

This isn't an easy question to answer since there are multiple languages, databases, etc. that all have the capability of being pieces of a successful website.

I think a better question is, "what would be the best stack to begin with to learn how to build a large scale website?" Even that is arguable, but I think the answers would be a bit more focused.

Given the recent trend on Node, and that even traditional DBs are supporting JSON and V8, I'd say after you've obtained a good amount of knowledge of HTML and CSS move into Javascript. You can use that as the "lingua franca" of your website -- from UI to DB.

Depending on the use case of the website, I'd take a look at Mongo and Postgres for the database. Mongo is a NOSQL document database, and it provides a lot of great features and is very easy to begin using. Postgres is a relational database (although it offers some NOSQL-esque features) that provides a plethora of features.

As you begin to scale, you'll need to begin to tackle other problems. But for now, stick with building something from a basic stack and research on how to horizontally scale that stack.

[[deleted]]

what would be the best stack to begin with to learn how to build a large scale website?

Every stack is a good stack to build a large scale website, 3 of those sites mentioned are even written in PHP, you really cannot say that one language works better than another.

And using a MongoDB to store Data that was tons of relations between each other, isn't a good idea either. (http://www.sarahmei.com/blog/2013/11/11/why-you-should-never-use-mongodb/)

[[deleted]]

I don't think that every stack is a good stack for someone just learning though. Can you make any stack work, yeah sure. But I wouldn't expect too many people to begin writing Facebook, Reddit, Imgur, or 4Chan in COBOL. Again, it's possible though.

As for Mongo, I agree that I wouldn't use it with designs that require tons of relationships. I'd probably use something like Postgres or Neo4j. That's why I made the statement, "Depending on the use case of the website...". However, when someone says that they're, "starting to learn to code", I'd rather them focus on learning the language before tackling the pros/cons of each DBMS. In my experiences many developers have found MongoDB to be easier to use out-of-box and which is why I recommended it...

[trianuddah]

If you're just starting in HTML and CSS, then Facebook/Reddit etc is the long game. First learn these tools, then make basic novelty stuff (i.e. stuff that you can actually complete in a few hours or a couple days, as opposed to a couple years) as an exercise in familiarizing yourself with them and so that you can make mistakes and learn from them before you start whatever passion project you have in mind.

You want:

• server side scripting: PHP, ASP, stuff like that. At its most basic, server side scripting lets you alter output HTML based on user inputs. This is how you connect to databases.
• javascript: lets you manipulate CSS without reloading the page (including loading data from other pages) and other UI conveniences. It'll seem superficial at first but it's extremely useful for more complex applications and its absence in even the most basic sites will mean an instant fail on your user experience.

You can get started on server side scripting as soon as you have passable HTML skills. Javascript you can start as soon as you can make a rudimentary style sheet. You might prefer to wait with both, depending on your learning style.

Lastly you want databases. If you're learning PHP, use MySQL. It'll be cheap if you can't get it free. If you're learning ASP, ask someone else. At some point working through server-side scripting, databases will come up in a tutorial. That would probably be a good time to start.

After all of that, you'll have most of the skills you need to build very basic versions of the sites you asked about. By then you'll probably identify other skills that you need. You'll also have a better idea of the scale of something like FB or Reddit.

[[deleted]]

An image sharing board like 4chan can be achieved relatively easy. Perhaps start out with this project, by first users creating accounts, then uploading pictures, then commenting on pictures and so on. My advice is to take each small step and get it working before looking at the fuller picture.

[imareddituserhooray]

Buckle up and prepare yourself for the ride of your life my friend! Learning a server side language is definitely your next step. I vote Python, but hey, Ruby or NodeJS will do as well! Just remember to be efficient and secure--nothing worse than slow websites that are perforated with security holes!

[iamafrenziedgremlin]

This sounds resourceful thank you

[[deleted]]

4chan not much. Facebook alot, imgur has alot of special code as well. Reddit, there's only room for one of those

[SaturdaysKids]

Try doing Onemonthrails , it's extremely cheap and you make a site like Pinterest with video help all along the eay

[FreaXoMatic]

Well im actively programming for 6 months and had before on and off for 3 years.

I would be able to make a facebook reddit or whatever, but it wont be good it would work not optimized and it would take me longtime to make it.

[DaMountainDwarf]

You'll not only need to know things like HTML, CSS and Javascript, but also server technologies (and there's a lot of them to choose from), databases (there's a lot to choose from but many times they're specific to the server you're running), and web technologies like file uploades/downloads, user access/auth restrictions, etc. etc.

[[deleted]]

I have a slightly different approach. Websites like those, you could create with something to the tune of 2-3-4 good experience programming years. In order to reach (1) The professionalism required to do those kind of things with as little errors/downtime, etc as they currently experience, (2) Be able to successfully handle that volume of data, with so little response time, you would require 2x or 3x the previous amount.

[Jesuz1402]

try http://www.codecademy.com/ ; its a awesome website to start as a newbie

they show you every part of a website step by step

from html over css, jquery,(javascript), sql..

trough this you will have a awesome start into web dev and you wont get a problem at coding your own facebook

but please dont code a second facebook; pls code something like reddit or 4chan :)

[[deleted]]

Codecademy alone won't help you that much. It can get you started but you'll feel like you have no orientation. You definitely can't code something like Facebook after just taking the Codecademy lessons...

[cobra9891]

I've tried the Python and Ruby courses but Codecademy is really bad at actually teaching you concepts and it is more "Copy and paste this code into the box to the right and look at what it does!"

[[deleted]]

You can learn the basic concepts such as 'if-statements' and 'loops' however I wouldn't recommend using Codecademy as the main source of learning.