You’re Learning Web Development the Wrong Way

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Show Notes

Common pitfalls of courses

• Start from random points in the development process
  - After an idea is already created and all requirements have been gathered
  - No planning phases
  - Development infrastructure and environment have already been setup
  - All the decisions have already been made on how to get from point A to point B
• Cover only basic implementations 
  - Ex. adding auth to a project, they’ll only cover something like local auth with username and password and store that information in a basic sqllite database
  - Talk about twitter clone example
• Critical thinking/problem solving
  - Courses will give you step-by-step guides on how to do things the instructor has already done dozens if not hundreds of times
  - They will intentionally avoid showing you slipups and mistakes
  - The unfortunate reality is that mistakes, bad decisions, broken libraries, etc. are what will be the biggest challenge when trying to complete a project on your own from scratch
• Don’t discuss integrations with 3rd parties
  - A lot of your projects will need potentially many integrations with different service providers
  - SSO, Newsletters, Analytics, Error handling, Uptime monitoring
• Don’t cover or gloss over debugging
  - Issues are bound to arise in any project and tech stack
  - Courses sometimes do have a section on debugging but it’s impossible to go deep enough it into this so you will be left with a shallow understanding of what to do when things go wrong
• No team dynamics discussed
  - How to work on a project with a small-large development team
  - Git workflows
  - CL/CI

How to go beyond courses

• Start by focusing on courses that have course projects
  - Once you finish a course project, take it and modify it in some way
  -- For example, if it’s a todo list, add some categorization to the todos
  -- For a weather app add some basic animations that are different depending on the weather
  -- Deploy the project and try to use it, find things that aren’t working the way you want and fix them
• Find a project to work on with a partner
  - Having even one extra person on a project will teach you a ton about collaboration and workflows
  - How do you make sure you’re not overwriting each others work?
  - How do you break up tasks so that you can work on multiple things simultaneously? 
  - How do you collaboratively come up with a list of requirements for a project?
• Hackathons
  - Find local or online hackathons and participate
  - You won’t learn how to build production applications usually but the nature of them will teach you how to deliver on tight deadlines
  - If there is a team then ++ for collaborative workflows
  - You will touch every aspect of the development process, idea to deployment and demonstration
• Ask for critiques, code reviews and criticism of your code
  - If you have a group of coding friends, send them your code with the expectation that they will tear it apart
  - Be willing to be wrong in how you do things and appreciate the people that tell you when you are
  - Offer up to reciprocate and do code reviews for other people
  - Open source your code whenever you can and send it to appropriate communities (discords, Twitter, some subreddits)
• Continuous learning
  - Join discord groups, listen to podcasts, follow web dev influencers to stay on top of the tech that is becoming popular
• If you can’t find a job or freelance gig, make your own production project
  - Brainstorm ideas
  - Gather requirements 
  -- From yourself and from potential users of what you’re building
  - Create a simple UI/UX for an MVP
  - Choose a tech stack
  - Plan out your development process
  - Build
  - Deploy
  - Get feedback 
  -- Add analytics
  -- Add error handling
  - Prioritize the feedback and act on it
  - Get more feedback
  - Going through this process you’ll hit roadblock after roadblock. The skills you gain from getting through them will be 10x more valuable than what a course will give you if you just follow it step by step.