Web Development Skills

Web Developer used to be a lowly paid bunch as compared to their client/server developer counterparts, until the boom of Web 2.0. Web Development used to be simple, involving only ASP, Access, HTML and perhaps a little bit of JavaScript. If you are a web developer today, you probably need to be equipped with more than a dozen to programming language, skill and technology.

What skills today’s web developers need to be equipped with?
First we have some basic skills

• HTML
• JavaScript
• CSS (don’t underestimate it’s power)
• Web Development Language: PHP, C# or VB.NET for ASP.NET, Java, Perl, Ruby, Python, etc.
• Database: MySQL or Microsoft SQL
• Graphics Manipulation: Photoshop or GIMP skills
• A sense of design

Server-side Skills (some System Admins doesn't even have these skill sets)

• Amazon Web Services (and installation of LAMP stack)
• Linux Commands, Shell Scripts, Configure Cron Jobs
• APC or MEMCACHE configuration
• Apache Optimization, HTACCESS configuration
• MySQL Optimization
• CDN configuration
• Load Balancing (1 million visitor range)

And some slightly more advance technology

• Google App Engine (GAE), using Python, Java or Go
• Google Maps API
• Google Web Toolkit, and framework (GWT-platform)
• Web Development Framework: CakePHP/CodeIgniter, ASP.NET MVC, Spring, Ruby on Rail, etc.
• Data Abstraction Framework: Hibernate, Objectify, ADO.NET Entity Framework
• JavaScript Framework: jQuery, Prototype, Ext JS, etc.
• Database: Google’s Big Table, NoSQL, Amazon’s SimpleDB
• Chrome Web App Development
• HTML5: Canvas, Offline Storage, File API, Sound & Video, Web Socket, CSS3, etc.
• Search Engine Optimization, Sitemaps, RSS, etc.
• Support for Desktop Web and Mobile Web (Smartphone, Tablets)
• Support for Multiple Browsers: IE6/7/8/9, Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Opera
• Flash
• Social Integration: Facebook Connect, Twitter API, etc.

Supporting Tech

• Android (A great website probably have a mobile apps as well)
• iOS
• Desktop Tool Development (develop supporting tools for offline processing): C#, Java, etc.

I wonder how well a season web developer compensated today, especially in Malaysia. A typical good programmer in US would be paid around USD 100,000 per year (some capable of reaching USD 200-400K). It's quite pathetic that senior software developer in Malaysia get around RM 4,000-8,000 monthly (probably with not more than 1.5 months bonus), but then the rising cost of programmers would put a toll on start-ups.