Become a Next-Level Web Developer
Do you have web development aspirations but feel overwhelmed? Tutorials don't work. I'm building a YouTube community to help you take your skills to the next level by building, shipping and iterating.
Do you know something about web development but feel overwhelmed about what to do next? Are you doing tutorial after tutorial but feel like you’re going in circles? Are you ready to take the next step in your developer journey but keep hearing that picking the wrong technology stack will lead to disaster?
I’ve been there, and I’m building a YouTube community to help.
I accidentally started programming in 2005 when I got a job as a web designer and didn’t realize that my print design experience wasn’t going to get me very far. I found myself in the deep end, knowing nothing about variables, functions, classes or objects, but desperately needing to know those things in order to understand the most basic documentation.
Three years later, I was a full-time app developer. I was a member of the jQuery and Rails core teams. I went on to create Bundler, Handlebars.js, became a member of the committee that standardizes JavaScript and created Cargo, Rust’s package manager.
Getting thrown into the deep end of the programming pool without a life jacket was the scariest thing that ever happened to me, but it was also the luckiest.
It forced me to confront a fundamental truth about programming: the best way to learn programming is to build and ship real software.
I want to help you make your web developer dreams come true.
I am working on building a YouTube community that will give you the motivation and tools to learn by building and shipping right away.
You’ll build your skills by working on features, not by watching tutorial after tutorial. We’ll go beyond the basics and build a mental map of the concepts you will need to build production-quality apps, like authentication, CSS layouts, data fetching, testing and continuous integration, and deployment. We’ll talk about the real technologies used today, but through the lens of more timeless concepts. When you encounter a new technology in the wild, you’ll understand how it fits into the bigger picture, and how to evaluate and learn it.
Finally, you’ll share your progress with others in the community to help you build confidence and keep you accountable.
I want my videos to make you feel real progress every day. I want you to avoid tutorial hell. And ultimately, I want you to develop the skills you will need to climb any programming mountain you feel like climbing.
I’m working hard on the first few videos. I plan to start publishing them soon, and will make them available to subscribers to this newsletter first. I also plan to post unfiltered, behind-the-scenes thoughts on my progress here.
If you’re ready to take your skills to the next level and want to be part of this journey, please subscribe.
P.S. I don’t intend to charge for this content, in the hopes of building a community of people dedicated to helping each other learn through building. When I got started, I used Windows even though everyone told me that Macs were the way to go, because I simply couldn’t afford a new machine. As my other work should demonstrate, I’m a big believer in building inclusive communities, and want people to be able to participate fully in this experiment even if they can’t afford to pay.