I am new to all this. I haven't worked in the industry yet, and I am only now building my first project for my final year at college. I played with Flutter a bit before and, more recently, with VueJS a little bit more.

Frameworks, for me, seem to be a double-edged sword. On one end, they make more projects feasible to individual developers and small teams. Projects are the best way to learn, and good projects enrich the industry, so that's cool. On the other end, they seriously lower the barriers to entry and make it harder to distinguish experience by looking at the end result alone. The code will always be revealing, of course, but the code is rarely looked at.

For my final-year project I am using Firebase with Quasar. This is where the fear kicked in. The combination of tools I am using made things easy; maybe even too easy.

Initially, I planned out long durations for small tasks to account for my lack of experience. However, once the work began, the time in which I learned the concepts and finished my authentication form with the accompanying services, surprised me. I thought I would need two weeks just for tutorials, let alone having something functional. I needed three days for both.

The Firebase SDK and Firestore rules did all the backend heavy-lifting, and Quasar made me laugh at myself as I looked at the elegant form that would have maybe cost me a month to build without those out-of-the-box components.

So the natural question that followed was this:

How afraid should we - the new kids on the block - be from competition in such a hot industry that keeps lowering the barriers to entry? What is the most efficient approach for a noob web developer to stand out?

I would love to hear how my fears are unfounded and how my question is invalid. This may be one of the rare occasions where one wishes for disapproving opinions.

So, whether you agree, have tips on how to compete, or you completely disagree; please, do share.