So I’ve been working through FCC and Codecademy on and off for about a year. At this point, I have received the front-end development certificate through FCC and have been working on the back-end stuff along with learning on Codecademy for reviewing and strengthening HTML, CSS, JS knowledge.
My question is are there any other resources out there for front-end to further develop my skills? I feel like as I learn new stuff, I start to forget the older stuff. I look back at the advanced algorithm scripting I did for front-end and almost feel like I won’t be able to do this if I tried to do it from scratch.
Another question I have is that for FCC and Codecademy, every project is done within its website or through websites like Codepen. If I was to start a project on my own, where do I start? What programs should I use? I have Atom downloaded on my computer for another course, but that’s about it.
For example, my wife sells hand-made wooden ornaments and furnitures on Etsy.com and I wanted to try to create a basic website for her to showcase her stuff.
Thanks! I have started the backend and completed the Git portion. I’m still trying to make sense of Git and cloud9. I follow the instruction on FCC but at this point, I feel like I’m just mindlessly completing what they ask instead of understanding what I’m doing.
Hopefully I can make sense of all this once I get more into it.
The git challenges are in fact pretty mindless, and could do with a rewrite. Really though, the best way to get familiar with git is to just use it – and to use the simplest subset of git that works best for you, because no sane person uses all of git’s features.
Well that’s reassuring to know. The git lessons only has 1 example for each lesson and even after I verified my work to check, I really didn’t know what I did. I think I’ll go back to it once more to practice frequently used commands to make sure at least I really have those down.
Do you guys have suggestions for any other resources for teaching Git and maybe practicing more on the front end?
I’ve found the best way to learn Git is by just putting as many of your projects on GitHub as possible and then using Git any time you make a change to them. The more you do it, the more comfortable you get. The Git-it desktop app is also really helpful in showing how to use both in conjunction.
For starting projects, I like to use Trello to write down all of the things I need or want to do, and then just work on them piece by piece. I also just start with something basic and build off of that. For example, with your wife’s site, I would just put together a basic template using Bootstrap and then add in all of the content and features you had in mind. I don’t bother perfecting the design until everything works the way I want.
You could do the React projects. Originally I never planned on learning react and just wanted to finish the front-end projects as fast as possible to get to the back-end. I did not even finish the algorithms since my goal was the back-end. Still I decided to at least try to learn React since people claim you can learn it in a day. It took me longer than that but its nice using React/Redux since you are pretty much forced into writing cleaner code. I really think freecodecamp’s biggest problem with the front-end is that they do not teach you how to write clean code but pretty much every react/redux tutorial will.
Honestly I feel like react and redux should be mandatory in the front-end certificate.
If you don’t know command line like me, I can honestly recommend the “Linux command line basics” first.
I’m actually at the end of the second course, concerning git and github and it’s great, you learn all the important stuff to start using git comfortably, finding bugs, making commits etc.
As for starting a project on your own, how to build a website without codepen, etc I would suggest you to learn Node.js as soon as you can.
Node.js is a low level environment, meaning you create almost everything from scratch, which makes it great for understanding how server/browser interact with each other, how all these pieces fit together.Install node.js on your machine or use cloud9 and start playing with it.You will find a lot of tutorials on youtube on how to create a server, communicate with you front-end app, etc.
If you have not, I would also recommend to get familiar with command line, and Linux in general.
I’ve been going through Node.js and I’m almost done with it, but I’m still not comfortable with what I’m doing. I vaguely understand the instructions and hints but after I finish each lessons, I don’t really feel like I’m getting the full understanding of what I just did.
