I Left Web Dev for 5 Years. Coming Back Feels Terrifying (Do It Anyway)

Last week I opened a frontend job listing and physically winced.

“React, TypeScript, Next.js, Tailwind, Node, GraphQL, CI/CD, Docker, Kubernetes, micro-frontends, Web3, AI integration…”

I closed the tab so fast I nearly sprained a finger and went back to what I do know: a cozy little .html file and a style.css that doesn’t talk back.

Hi, my name is That Developer Who Blinked for Five Years and Woke Up in a Different Industry™.
My weaponry: HTML, CSS, some faint memories of jQuery, and a deep sense that I’ve slept through several technological apocalypses.

And yet, here’s the ugly, inconvenient truth chewing on my brain:

In 20 years, I won’t hate myself for the bugs I shipped.
I’ll hate myself for the things I never even tried.

So yeah, this isn’t just a nostalgic rant about the good old days of float: left. It’s a battle cry—for you, for me, for every “outdated” dev staring at job posts like they’re written in Elvish.

It’s time to untie the safety ropes.

The Industry Moved On. You Blinked. Now What?

Let’s be honest: five years away from web dev is like fifty years in most other professions.

When I stepped back, we were arguing about whether CSS Grid would ever replace Bootstrap, and React hooks were still a heated conference talk, not a religion.

Now?

Every landing page is a hyperspeed Single Page Application.
Build tools went from “run Gulp” to “here’s a bundler that requires a PhD.”
CSS went from “write a stylesheet” to “are you using Tailwind, CSS-in-JS, CSS Modules, or just pure chaos?”
AI is now writing code, reviewing pull requests, and quietly making us question our career choices.

Meanwhile I’m here like:
“Where do I put my link rel="stylesheet" again?”

It’s very tempting to decide:

“This isn’t for me anymore. I missed the train. I’ll just… not.”

That’s the cowardly voice.
And before you get defensive: yes, I have that voice too. Loudly. Daily.

But here’s the thing:

In 20 years, do you really want to look back and say,
“I never tried to come back because the job listing had too many buzzwords”?

Really?

Safety Is Comfortable. It’s Also a Slow, Polite Death.

For a lot of us, “stepping away” from web dev didn’t look dramatic. No shouting, no slammed laptops. Maybe you:

Took a non-tech job “just for a bit” to pay the bills.
Stayed at a comfy company where your skills slowly fossilized.
Had kids, or health issues, or burnout, and coding felt like the last thing your brain could handle.

So you parked the ship in a safe little bay.
No storms. No waves. No risk.

And now, years later, you’re staring at the open sea again. It’s loud, it’s chaotic, and every boat out there looks bigger, faster, and powered by 19-year-olds who learned Rust between TikTok sessions.

The temptation is to stay tied to the dock.

But here’s the problem with that “safety”:

You stop growing.
You stop testing yourself.
You stop seeing what you’re capable of.

You don’t fail spectacularly.
You just… never show up to the game.

And in 20 years, that’s going to sting more than any production outage ever could.

Most of your real regret won’t come from code you broke.
It’ll come from paths you never walked because you were scared of the map.

“I Only Know HTML and CSS” — The Lie You Tell Yourself

Let’s clear something up.

If you truly understand HTML and CSS—not just “copy from Stack Overflow,” but actually understand structure, semantics, layout, typography, accessibility—you’re not outdated.

You’re under-leveraged.

Modern web dev is stacked on top of exactly those things:

React components still render HTML.
Tailwind still compiles to CSS.
Every fancy framework still ends up pushing styled boxes onto a screen for humans to use.

The industry loves to pretend that what matters is the newest framework, but under the hype, the fundamentals haven’t changed:

Users still hate slow, confusing interfaces.
Clean structure still matters for SEO and accessibility.
Good layout still separates “meh” sites from “wow” ones.

So no, you’re not “just HTML & CSS.”
You’re the person who actually understands the thing everyone else is abstracting away from.

That’s not weakness. That’s leverage.

Screaming at the Sky About Modern Web Dev (A Short, Honest Prayer)

Let me just get this out of my system:

Dear Web Development Gods,

Why does spinning up a “simple” project now involve:

Initializing three CLIs,
Installing 800MB of node modules,
Configuring a bundler,
Setting up environment variables,
Wrestling with TypeScript configs,
And then still getting a “cannot find module” error for something that clearly exists?

Why does every tutorial start with:

“It’s simple, you just set up a monorepo, configure TurboRepo, wire in your Lint-Staged hooks, add Husky, configure your CI pipeline, and then we’ll add a button.”

A BUTTON.

Once upon a time, I wrote:

<button>Click me</button>

And it just… worked.

So yeah, if you feel like screaming “WHAT HAPPENED TO US?!” at the sky sometimes, you’re not alone.

But after the screaming, what then?

You either:

Roll your eyes, shut the laptop, and go back to a life of “I used to do web dev once,”
or
You accept that the ocean is bigger now—and you start learning how to sail again.

What “Taking Risks” Actually Looks Like (For a Rusty Dev)

We romanticize risk like it always means quitting your job, founding a startup, and raising $5 million before lunch.

For most of us, risk is quieter and much less Instagrammable.

It looks like:

Opening a modern JavaScript tutorial and feeling stupid… and not closing it.
Building a tiny project in public and sharing it, even if it’s embarrassingly simple.
Applying for a junior/mid role again after years away, swallowing your ego, and being okay with that.
Telling your imposter syndrome to shut up for 30 minutes while you try something new.

You don’t need to jump off a cliff.

You just need to consistently walk slightly beyond where you’re comfortable.

Think of it like this:

Today’s risk: Set up a basic React or Vue app. Break it. Fix it. Swear. Repeat.
This week’s risk: Publish a tiny project on GitHub and share it somewhere.
This month’s risk: Reach out to someone in the industry and ask a question, or request feedback.
This year’s risk: Change jobs. Start freelancing. Pivot back into tech full-time.

You don’t get your life back in one dramatic montage.
You claw it back in a thousand tiny, unglamorous, courageous steps.

“But I’m Behind. I’ll Never Catch Up.”

You will never “catch up.”

Not because you’re incapable, but because no one is caught up. The stack moves too fast.

The good news? You don’t have to. You just need enough:

Enough JavaScript to build interactive UI.
Enough understanding of one framework to be productive.
Enough tooling knowledge to ship and debug.
Enough confidence to say, “I don’t know this yet, but I can figure it out.”

Here’s a brutal but freeing truth:

Companies don’t hire you because you know everything.
They hire you because you can learn anything you need to.

So instead of trying to swallow the entire ecosystem in one gulp, ruthlessly narrow your focus:

Pick a lane.
- Frontend-focused? Learn modern JS + one framework (React, Vue, Svelte—pick one and stop browsing “best framework 2025” articles).
- More design-inclined? Lean into UI, UX, accessibility, and strong HTML/CSS plus basic JS.
- Curious about fullstack? Add a simple backend (Node/Express, Next.js API routes, etc.).
Pick a stack for one real project.
Not 19 tutorials you never finish.
One project that solves a tiny real problem—yours or someone else’s.
Ship embarrassing work.
Your first few projects will be ugly, overengineered, or hilariously basic.
Good. That means you’re moving.

Life Is Not a Dress Rehearsal (And Neither Is Your Career)

We love to pretend we have infinite time.

“I’ll get back into coding when things calm down.”
“I’ll update my portfolio next month.”
“I’ll learn React when I have a proper stretch of free time.”

Here’s the uncomfortable reality:

Life doesn’t send calendar invites titled “Now Everything Is Perfect For You to Improve Yourself.”

There is no dress rehearsal for this.

This is the show.

You’re supposed to be:

A little underprepared.
A little scared.
A little confused.

And you’re supposed to go on anyway.

Because in 20 years, “I tried and failed to get back into web dev” is a much better story than
“I thought about it for decades and never moved.”

Better a messy, imperfect, risky comeback
than a lifetime of “I could have, maybe.”

Staying Yourself in a World Obsessed With Hype

In all this “go out there and get what’s yours” energy, there’s a trap:

You can lose yourself trying to become what you think the market wants.

Suddenly you’re:

Pretending to love whatever framework is trending on Twitter this week.
Talking in buzzwords you don’t fully believe in.
Treating your GitHub like a performance instead of a record of your learning.

Stop.

You’re allowed to:

Care deeply about clean, semantic HTML.
Love CSS more than JavaScript.
Value human-readable code over clever abstractions.
Prefer accessibility and performance over unnecessary animation.

The point isn’t to become a carbon copy of a “modern dev.”

The point is to bring your taste, your experience, and your stubborn humanity into a space that badly needs it.

“Having the balls to take what’s yours” doesn’t mean trampling others.
It means refusing to abandon who you are just to fit into a tech-shaped costume.

Okay, Motivational Speech Is Cute. But How Do We Actually Survive?

Let’s get tactical.
“We will survive” sounds great on a T-shirt, but what does it look like in practice?

Here’s a brutally realistic survival plan for the “out of the market” web dev:

1. One Core Language, One Core Framework

Commit to modern JavaScript. No more running from it.
Pick one framework and marry it for the next 6–12 months.
- React, Vue, Svelte—just pick one and stop scrolling “pros and cons” threads.

You’re not choosing a life partner. You’re choosing a tool to get moving.

2. Build a “Comeback Portfolio”

Not a generic template gallery. A story:

Project 1: Simple, static site (HTML/CSS + minimal JS). Show that you can still ship clean UIs.
Project 2: A small interactive app (e.g., a budget tracker, habit tracker, or simple dashboard).
Project 3: Something with an API or backend (even a simple one), to show you understand data and not just pixels.

Each project should answer:

“What problem does this solve, and what did I learn building it?”

3. Publicly Document the Struggle

Seriously, don’t just study in secret.

Tweet small lessons.
Blog short posts about what broke and how you fixed it.
Record a quick screen capture of you walking through part of your code.

You’re not showing off. You’re building proof of life.

It says:
“I’m in the arena. I’m learning. I’m not dead yet.”

4. Talk to Actual Humans

Terrifying, I know.

Join a local meetup or online community.
Ask dumb questions. (Spoiler: they’re not dumb, and half the room is thinking the same thing.)
Offer help where your HTML/CSS experience gives you an edge. Younger devs often underestimate those fundamentals.

Connections beat algorithms. Someone remembering “that person who’s grinding hard to come back” can change your life more than a thousand leetcode sessions.

5. Accept That Doubt Is Part of the Deal

You will have days when you think:

“I’m too old for this.”
“I’m too far behind.”
“Everyone else is smarter.”
“AI will just replace me anyway.”

You have a choice:
Treat those thoughts as instructions (“give up”) or as background noise (“yeah yeah, noted, now I’m going back to my code”).

You survive by moving while doubting yourself. Not after the doubt magically goes away.

We Will Survive (But How, Really?)

We survive not because the industry is kind, or the tools are simple, or the path is straightforward.

We survive because we:

Show up anyway. Even when we feel late, rusty, or ridiculous.
Keep our core. We let the tech change without letting it erase who we are.
Take small, real risks. Not just daydreams and plans, but actions that could fail.
Refuse to stay tied to the dock. We choose the open sea, with all its chaos, over slow, quiet regret.

In 20 years, you’re going to meet a future version of yourself.
That person will know exactly what you did with this fear, this moment, this chance to come back.

Make them proud.

Untie the ropes.
Close the job listing for now if you must—but open your editor.
Write the ugly code. Fight with the framework. Swear at the build tools. Try again.

Life isn’t a dress rehearsal.
Your career isn’t either.

It’s now or never.
Get the hell out there and take what’s yours—
and do it as you, or it’s not worth taking at all.

Dev is Dead