Learning Web Development Is Not Easy, But This Article Made It Easy.
Hey, if you ever think learning web development is easy at first I challenge you to tell me how in the comment box.
There are many resources, bootcamps, online courses, hack challenges, coding games, peer communities, YouTube channels, web programming languages etc. The proliferation of these resources, frameworks and tools is on the high side. Wannabies, newbies, and young developers get confused. In reality, this proliferation is intimidating and indeed makes web development seem like a wide endless ocean where young developers want to cross without boat or swimming aids. At best, it poses the challenge of choosing the best approach or tools. The confusion is so intimidating that young developers want to test all available or trending resources at the same time.
Here is a simple guide to getting started and being the best at each stage.
Conviction and Passion is key
You need to give coding a trial not trying to check if coding will give you a trial. That sounds weird right? Get it straight, I can’t quickly say you must have passion for web development because your skill-set is not enough to strongly convince your weak self about building your life around programming. All you need now is taste and quest for learning. When you have genuine quest to learn at a taste, your passion is gradually built over challenges you face along the line. But, when you horridly convince yourself that you have passion for programming, you may likely settle for anything called programming. That’s why young developers run from one framework to the other, may be because their passion runs on these frameworks and they have to pursue it until they get it. Lol.
Watching YouTube videos, reading all tutorial sites and downloading all programming e-books for 10 years will never make you a good developer.
Yes! That’s is true. The best way to be a ‘unicodeveloper’ is follow a learning curve. Let’s drive it home. If you read w3schools for ten years you might still be a dump developer. But, if you enroll in a learning curve program on Codecademy, freeCodeCamp, etc you are being modeled towards a development path which you must use other resources to scale. Now, get the idea. When you read tutorials for a particular language, you are just exercising your brain and satisfying your ability to learn. But, when you enroll into a model program for learning a particular language, it keeps you on track and make you learn more important modules of that language in a practical learning curve. Model programming platforms like Freecodecamp push you out of the box and make you desire to learn more. You enjoy learning when you can track your progress, rate your status and envisage your future. You’re modeled into using other resources like video tutorials, stackoverflow, w3schools, MDN etc in a more productive manner and effective learning approach.
Join a community and peer coding programs
Developers are no monks. You don’t need to be a solo king of yourself kingdom to be a good programmer. Hey, you have to associate, engage and peer program. What’s is programming without peer review. Freecodecamp makes it easy by connecting you to like minds in your local area. You can connect via WhatsApp, Facebook, Slack or Gitter. Your passion and knowledge grows rapidly when you join a developer network.
Read Trends and Discuss Trends
Hey, programming is no sacred language exclusively reserved for software engineers. If you don’t read tech blogs you may lose torch of the industry updates and be trapped in a recursive track of learning obsolete framework or approach like PHP guys who still use procedural approach. Medium and Twitter made it easy to follow publications or thread of interest without using Google alert service (Lol, who still uses Google alert). I read Techpoint, Techcabal, Techcrunch and other sources I stumble upon on social media.
Engage with peers on social media and attend meetups.
Build Real Projects and Clone Pens
You learn by building. You don’t know how good you are until you build projects for users. You have built, calculator, chat bot, dig-dog game, tribute page etc. It is time to pull the next learning curve. With any stack of your choice, make real projects like building templates for static websites, clone Google homepage and Twitter login page, clone YouTube, popular blog or build an e-commerce page. Then build your portfolio page with such enthusiasm making your design elegant, thereby solidifying your confidence level to taking a real job or facing a real market.
If you want to master a stack you have to teach the stack.
In my next publication, I will write more inspiring article on how to master a stack by teaching it. Meanwhile, I will be publishing another article this week entitled ‘JavaScript Promise and Closures; the simple meaning’.
PHDevConnect is a free, open community of Port Harcourt based Developers, UI / UX Designers, Project managers, Architects etc who can create their own digital team or join other teams for paid/open sourced projects.
