Ask HN: Picking up web development as a back end developer

[dnnrly]

I've been a backend/systems developer for a long time now. Plenty of C++ with template magic, J2EE, implementing REST APIs in Spring with complex integration to external components. I'm definitely not a novice programmer.

But every time I start to explore web development I get lost in the mass of frameworks and opinions or I'm presented with a bunch of high SEO articles trying to tell me what HTML stands for.

Can anyone suggest where I can get started as an experienced developer? For example, stuff like setting up a NodeJS dev environment and dependency management properly.