This was fantastic. Well written and thorough.
My own programming journey had been very on/off since my teens. Sadly I had a few really shitty programming teachers in middle school and high school, put I've persevered and managed to pick up a decent amount.
I'm familiar with a lot of the languages you mentioned, but haven't touched server side stuff, yet (I'll admit it, it's intimidating!).
You're post has reminded me of just how much learning and effort I have ahead of me.... Namely, all of it. Lol.
Thank you for your in-depth comment as well! Appreciated!!
Regarding the "server-side stuff" being intimidating, you're referring to a PHP, NodeJS, or Python, or Golang, or Elixir back-end, right? The level of complexity of that can indeed be intimidating at first. (Well, thb, PHP being the exception as it is quite beginner-friendly I think.) The order I mentioned (steps 1 -> 2 -> 3 etc.) correlates to the associated learning curve: if you choose to follow the JavaScript route, beginning with jQuery (easy, instant results, gets you motivated), then vanilla JS, then some barebones NodeJS (pro tip: read up on the new await/async feature, it let's you return values asynchronously which is syntactically akin to "regular JS"), and only then look into using one or more frameworks for production-level applications). I addressed especially the programming learning curve in this guide / tutorial!