So You’ve Learned HTML, CSS, and JavaScript; Now What? (Part 3)
This is part 3 in a long series on first-steps for bootcamp grads or solo learners who have invested time into learning HTML, CSS, and JavaScript as a path towards becoming a web developer, but find themselves mired in the alphabet soup of frameworks, deployment tools, performance metrics, data structures, component libraries, and more.
EDIT: The content of this series will be updated and fleshed out over time, so I’d encourage you to check back to a given piece which did not dive deeply enough into its topic on your first read.
This is for those intrepid individuals seeking to break into a competitive job market with newfound coding skills, but have been unable to approach the inaccessible professional dialogue focusing ever on the shiny pre-requisite-heavy tool of the day or the newest and most irritating means of acronymical truncation of the English language.
So you’ve learned HTML, CSS, and JavaScript; now what?
Get More Comfortable With Your Terminal
Working in your terminal is an inevitability. While most of what would otherwise need to be done in a terminal window has been successfully abstracted into nice user interfaces (such as your computer’s finder), there will still come a time when you need to at least be familiar with the process of using the terminal as part of your workflow. I’ll revisit exactly what those stages of the workflow will be in a later article, but for now, it’s a good idea for you to get comfortable navigating within (the “cd” command) and creating and deleting folders and files from (namely, the “touch”, “mkdir”, and “rm” commands) a terminal window/command line shell.
This is, of course, assuming you’re already comfortable with the notion of relative file paths.
While you’re at it:
Chum up to Git and Github
All of my students have had exposure to Git and Github. Together they constitute an absolutely essential component of a professional workflow (regardless of how one feels about Microsoft’s purchase of Github). At its most basic, think of Github as cloud storage for your code and code projects. If you’ve ever tried emailing a zipped code project to a friend or client, only to have it spat back to you because that .js file represents a security risk, you should at least be familiar with the most practical limitation to sharing code.
Enter Github. While services like Google Drive or Dropbox can be used to share code, Github is a code-sharing platform made exclusively for code-sharing. Collaborators can view your code without having to download and unzip and load up an IDE; you can even host your code which you’ve pushed into a Github repository to a live static site using the Github Pages feature.
Still, that’s just scratching the surface. Github facilitates code collaboration in a huge way, and enables developers to leverage it using Git, a terminal language built to communicate with the Github service from your local hard drive.
It’s important to understand the broad strokes at the very least. So explore creating new repositories, cloning, pushing and pull requests, commits, using Github pages, creating branches for version control, merging branches, working on the same project on multiple machines, inviting collaborators, and cloning other developers’ repositories to explore and learn from their code (Github is a powerful driver of the open-source community, after all!).
Finally, since we’re on the subject of the terminal and of Github:
Get Ready to Start Using a Package Manager
Don’t worry, I’m not going to jump into this yet, but a package manager will also be an essential part of a more professional workflow. For the time being, just be sure you have nodeJS installed. The install will come with Node Package Manager, or npm, which I’ll insist you get plenty of use out of down the line.
Evan is an illustrator, developer, designer, and animator who tells stories in any which way he can. When he’s not branding businesses or building front-end apps; he’s illustrating children’s books, painting for tabletop games, animating commercials, or developing passion projects of his own.
