One framework per week?

It’s a bold resolution, and one that I hope will keep me focused on a much broader mission:

My New Year’s Resolution

To advance my understanding of — and ability to leverage — today’s popular/trending/useful/highly-sought-after tools used to prototype, design and/or build web and mobile applications — without spending a dime.

1 per week…are there really that many?

Frameworks? It’s highly likely. Tools in general? Absolutely. In fact, I could probably have re-written the title to ‘One {{web tool thingy}} per day’. But I have a day job, a night job, and a wife and dogs. So even the ‘per week’ part is a bit of a stretch.

What’s with that last part, cheapskate?

Hi, I’m Robert…and I have an addiction.

“Hi, Robert”

In the last two years, I probably spent over a grand on video tutorials and ebooks. This was in hopes of achieving the exact New Year’s Resolution you see above. Many of these ebooks still sit on my bookshelf (the until recently skeuomorphic one on my iPad) unread. At least half of these video tutorials remain unwatched in my Udemy library.

My point is: I spent a lot of money on educational material, when I probably could have achieved the same (if not better) level of education by reading documentation provided by the tool-makers.

But I was afraid. Afraid of being dissuaded by technical mumbo-jumbo. Afraid of feeling frustrated when after reading once thru I still didn’t get something. Afraid of failing at something that I hadn’t really even given myself a decent chance of succeeding at. Now that’s silly!

Why learn things only a developer needs to know?

I aspire to be a great UXer. If I learned anything from the material I read/watched/listened-to, it’s that a great UXer is able to communicate and empathize with his/her stakeholders, colleagues and users. This New Year’s Resolution falls under the middle one: colleagues. The developers that I will inevitably work with will become even strong allies in our crusade to create successful user experiences if I am able to express my design ideas in the clearest way possible. And if I can cobble together a working prototype with code that they can then extend or reuse to build the final product, then win/win!

Episode IV: A New Hope

This time will be different. Why? Because I’m actually doing it! No, really. Over the Christmas holiday, my wife and I spent two days up in Franklin, NC with her parents. It rained almost the entire time. The wifi was spotty. There was no cell service. All of this made for perfect learning conditions.

I pointed my browser to angular.io, and forced myself to complete the 5-minute Quickstart designed to help newcomers create their first Angular 2 app. After successfully completing it, I read the guide again — this time updating the comments in my code. From there, I dove straight in to the ‘Tour of Heroes’ tutorial guide. Taking it one step at a time, I completed the currently available lessons and had a working app running on a live node-powered local server. Once complete, I continued to the next part of the guide, where several core concepts are described and demoed at length. I would read, code, complete, and read again, making sure the concepts made enough sense before proceeding.

An eerily familiar way to learn

I believe Zed Shaw calls this ‘Learning {{X}} The Hard Way’. For me, it turns out it’s the best way. APIs and documentation are quickly becoming standard reading material for any wanna-be-self-starting senior developer. I just wish it hadn’t taken this long for me to get over my false assumptions about how inaccessible this material would be.

What’s your New Year’s Resolution?

Please do share. Perhaps we can help each other stay on track as the year wages on.