Invisible Barriers That Prevent You From Learning Web Development and How to Break Through Them

The hidden cost of frustrating, demotivating web development MOOCs! For years, I’ve tried studying web development through various online courses. And every time I ended up before trying again! So I know the struggle and the ubiquitous . frustrated and demotivated for months meme Then, I started building full responsive clones for great web-pages like: , , , , and more in less than 4 weeks! Youtube TNW Behance Newsweek out of the necessity of having a , I researched the state of CSS in 2019. It’s then that I realized that MOOCs as great as they are, can be gatekeepers! So what happened? coding partner So in this article, I will discuss that and answer the following questions: are discouraging MOOCs dangerous? WHY are MOOCs discouraging? HOW can you do about it? WHAT Why The world needs more software developers. Even with programmers supply doubling every 5 years, demand is growing even faster! “Software is eating the world” — Marc Andreessen Co-founder of Netscape Every industry is integrating Software development at every step. From hiring management to supply chain to advertisement and sales, Software is essential. Not mentioning design, optimization, and manufacturing of their products. It’s a necessity to stay competitive. You may argue that there are rather too many programmers instead, and only good ones are scarce. so how would more non-CS graduates help solve that problem? Well, I am well aware of the difference between a coder and a software developer, and I strive to be the later. I am not arguing that we don’t need improvement in quality. but quantity has quality on its own and you can’t get more of the later without starting with more of the former! But don’t take my word for it, take it from those “ ! Leaders and trendsetters” And I hope that more can help us face . financial independence dangerous stagnation Front-end is the gate! What does any of that have to do with CSS for example? It’s not even a programming language! OK, it but come on, it’s a style-sheet. can encode Rule 110 Indeed Front-end development is more about “ ” as to name it. And it is possible to have a career where you stay in that lane and never become a programmer. UX Engineering some suggest Nonetheless, Front-end development is the most approachable for anyone with no CS background. It’s also the most accessible market. HTML & CSS will always be the first thing anyone tries once the idea of career shift come through their minds. That also explains why JavaScript is the first language most people learn! And it is actually a good first step, it is visual rather than logical or mathematical. You will often hear people joke about how bad at math they are, but they take pride in their taste and style. So it’s rather disappointing when they feel discouraged and repelled by a style-sheet. And it is very easy to . mistake Confusing with Complex In most cases all around the world career shift is hard and risky. getting a job or starting making money through freelance can be crucial. Deterring someone at this early stage can mean the end of their Tech pursuit. How Remember: Reddit is only an Alt-Tab away! -Quincy Larson While preparing to write this article, I watched a by Quincy Larson. In it, he talked about the fight for readers attention while writing a technical article. But it also applies for self-learn platforms as well. talk Readers are looking for an excuse to close your article! -Quincy Larson Yes, self-teaching coders, should have more grit and discipline. But still, career shift is scary, and their defense systems are looking for reasons to give up. So it baffles me how FreeCodeCamp curriculum looks like : Days and days of learning small snippets of very basic HTML and CSS! And for some reason, you still didn’t learn about any recent development like Flexbox or CSS-grid! Not mentioning that you have nothing to show for it, to ease your self-doubt. Here you can notice several tendencies: - Mistaking old as fundamental, and new as advance! I can’t see an upside in delaying learning and and -as far as I can remember- even ! Flexbox CSS-Grid Box-sizing Why force students to struggle through outdated tools? Praying day in and day out that everything will make sense somehow! I would say the same about dismissing pre-compilers as a tool for advanced users. In fact, it has a very shallow learning curve and can only make the student feel smarter and more in control. is also a very welcome boost to student’s confidence. Sass Flow Control - Under-appreciating the importance of early achievements! The longer a student spends going through infinite baby-steps, the worse. Building real-world projects boost their confidence, enhances learning, and cements concepts. There are only so many abstract concepts you can force your brain to memorize before it repels. . Jumping into coding and researching on a need to know basis, is more efficient in the long run Those projects have to be real websites. , and show off. Students need to build something they can take pride in What Enough with the rant, off to a more practical note, here is a simple guide to what worked for me: Goal This guide aims to be an alternative approach for learning Responsive web design. One that takes the student’s urgent need for a sense of progression into account. Method - Learn on a need to know basis. learning helps you to know , and . Project-based what you don’t know why you need to know it As counter-intuitive as it sounds: tricks. Master the few you got until you have to learn new ones to get the job done. Resist the temptation to learn more - Maintain the Flow Your momentum is a priority, be vigilant to the time you spend on a task, and omit anything that slows you down. when you need to learn a new tool or review a resource. Learn to spot the keywords and reach for conclusions. Take note of the resource and review it later if you need an in-depth study. Skim read Learning to write faster with the least mistakes is invaluable, take time to improve that. it allows you to try things faster, and push through your chocking points. Write faster. As you go, notice all the repetitive tasks and see if there is a way to save time on it. search for cheatsheets, hotkeys, custom settings, or automation opportunities. Customize and automate - Always Cheat! Win if you can lose if you must but always cheat! -Jesse Ventura Good engineers are lazy. Cut corners to achieve much more than you could on your own, as long as it’s outside the scope of what you are trying to learn. I chose to clone because I know it already looks great on its own. Clone pretty websites! Behance In my , I used Kurzgesagt’s videos because of their amazing visuals. Use great art to populate your clones. Youtube Clone For content-heavy webpage, copy all content elements to your HTML file. You can then use RegExp to improve the semantics and apply your own classes. Don’t write Content. It was not possible to replicate every behavior of without JS. I wasn’t trying to learn JS at that point so I excused my self to copy code from Stackoverflow and change it for my needs. Go the extra steps with ready code snippets. Newsweek - Pixel Perfect Yes, you can cheat and cut corners and still be a perfectionist. The goal is to make an exact replica, indistinguishable from the original. Your job is to make a vertical slice of a full website, so responsiveness is not optional. Getting started I recommend as your text editor and any for best developer tools. VScode Chromium browser Then you will need to install a few extensions for VScode to make your life easier: will help you format your HTML, CSS, Sass and JS files. Beautify will help you write better CSS. Stylelint will enable you to examine your changes whenever you save it. Live server will recompile your Sass files to CSS whenever you save as sass file. Live Sass Compiler You can also install the But I would rather install extensions as the need arise, but take a look nonetheless. Web Development Essentials Extension Pack. Start Building Once you choose a webpage to clone, then this general process should be a good start: , and organize your Folder Structure: - Set up your project directory. Set-up Git project-directory │ index.html └── assets ├── images │ icon.png └── stylesheets main.css main.scss Start writing ‘doc’ and VScode should suggest the following: - Start your index.html. Document html lang "en" head meta charset "UTF-8" meta name "viewport" content "width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0" meta http-equiv "X-UA-Compatible" content "ie=edge" title title head body body html As you can see are super useful and you should learn more about it. Now link your stylesheet, add your title and icon: Emmet abbreviations ... Webpage Title ... meta http-equiv "X-UA-Compatible" content "ie=edge" link rel "stylesheet" href "assets/stylesheets/main.css" title title link rel "icon" href "assets/images/icon.png" head Start using Live server and Sass Live compiler to examine changes going forward. in the original page to inspect its layout in the mobile version. Mobile-first approach means fewer positioning needed at first, and incremental changes later. You might need to show media queries as well. Analyze the structure of the page. Schematic diagram would help as well. - Inspect and analyze Toggle Device Toolbar Start laying out the general structure using . - Build the Layout with HTML5 semantic. HTML5 elements For this stage, should be all you need. It will be most handy for justifying and aligning each element’s content. - Start populating elements. CSS Flexbox Start expanding the width of your page, and set up a new for each breaking point. You will also need to have more control over your layout so start using . Also, check out . - Expand and position. media query CSS-Grid this article @ only screen and (min-width: ) { ... } media 576px Copy Images, paragraphs and other content from the original HTML. Use VScode’s in the to improve the semantics and apply your own classes to the copied HTML. This might seem complicated but it is a powerful tool to avoid entering tens of content. You can experiment with it and see the example below - Start populating content. RegExp find and replace here . Old div class "old-classes" data-event-categ... Some content Some content Some content Some content div Find : Replace : RegExp \n((.+\n)+) div class ".+" . \ div \n$1 article class "new-classes" article New article class "new-classes" Some content Some content Some content Some content article Congratulations, you opened Pandora’s box. many problems will be evident at once. Don’t panic, this is the plan all along, to discover what you need to learn, now start searching for answers. one problem at a time. You already noticed that will be your best friend. - Kill the snakes CSS Tricks Rinse and repeat until you have a perfect page! Conclusion Front-end development is and will stay for a long time every newbie’s first contact with IT. and it’s currently a gatekeeper rather than an enabler. I can’t guarantee that the guide I offered will work for everyone. but it is worth trying If you tried once and failed. Jump into it, no hello world anymore, find a page that looks great and clone it. Let me know what do you think!