Show HN: Learn Web Development for Free with The Odin Project
theodinproject.com
theodinproject.com
I swear if you follow the 5 step setup on the homepage, you can have a working web app in less than five minutes :)
I am serious, lowering the bar for web development is something we are really trying hard to tackle...
I am happy to get anyone else interested, started.
Stabilization is good. I can better decide if I want to commit the time to learn the skills. The frameworks might change, but I still might only need to learn 4 or so frameworks across 2 or 3 languages.
What I worry about is that it will become the norm to spend 4+ years to get ANY sort of programming position just because you have such a large checklist of requirements.
I think we can say for certainty that HTML, CSS and JavaScript will be around for a while, so that's comforting at least.
Sure, but maybe their relevance will change? https://www.google.com/webdesigner/
For instance, although I am trying to cut down on the WordPress projects that I am doing (I am working on projects in a bespoke PHP framework), WP allowed me to have a project up and running and not worry about a lot of the things that I now worry about, all without learning every element of the web.
That said, there are a lot of things that I didn't know (and I am sure that I still don't know) which led to my projects being worse than they had to be... but my point is that for a lot of folks starting out the bar is very low depending on what kind of projects they are working on: it's not necessary to design an app from the ground up to do useful work on the web.
Google everything and learn how to view source when you are curious how another site is doing something. Sometimes it will be difficult to follow. Sometimes it's like a rabbit hole, but it gets easier to read and trace as your overall understanding improves.
Is there a real shortage of web developers out there? I'm not so sure. Perhaps there is a shortage of GOOD web developers out there. And I doubt that a good future web developer will learn better from a dedicated course rather than reading the rails tutorial / or watch rails casts on their own.
I mean, learning to learn and finding information by yourself (for me as a hiring manager) is much more important than what you currently know. I'm interested in what you could potentially do, not what you already did.
And if you know what you already know by researching on your own and building your own curriculum then I might be a bit more impressed (although probably I shouldn't be) - just because this is how I learned web development. By building things, and Googling things. By stackoverflow, MDN, and yes also w3schools. By reading the HTML spec, by reading ECMAScript language specification, by taking academic RDBMS theory course as part of my undergrad degree. I might be completely wrong, but I would need a lot of good faith to believe that with an online self contained crash course someone is able to become a fully qualified web developer without doing some leg work.
In other words a really good web development course in my opinion is a bad one. It makes it too easy on a new developer, making them think that all the information will be available for them and every task is broken down into small edible pieces. I want people to know what it is to be challenged with a question they don't know and research.
Having a good set of resources laid out for me certainly doesn't take away from the fact that I've still got to learn them but it does prevent me from wasting time with inferior ones. There's also value in producing and marshaling those resources because there will always be a set of people who might have been great developers but never really entered the learning funnel because they didn't have access to good resources at the time when they were ripe to explore them.
In terms of ease of learning, sites like codecademy make it extremely easy to get started but you're certainly not going to be able to learn an employable skillset by working solely in a hand-holding browser environment. That's why I've tried to focus on building real (and often difficult) projects along the way in this curriculum. Start to finish, it will likely take ~1000 hours to complete.
I guess my points are that A) development will (and should) require a certain degree of actual effort to learn because that's how you develop problem solving skills but finding the right resources to do so shouldn't, and, B) making those resources more accessible helps more people potentially great find their way to the profession.
That being said, I think there's something to exploring those resources on your own. The principal problem I've seen with teaching people to code, especially when confronted with a set track, is that learners start rigorously, taper off, and never finish. I'm curious what The Odin Project's approach to this issue is.
Many of our students start from the beginning and work through the curriculum in order but more tend to cherry pick lessons as needed to fill in the gaps in their knowledge. That's fine too and it's why the whole thing is available at once. The important part about having the path laid out, though, is that it keeps you accountable for your progress -- you know when you're getting off-track because you can see each piece of knowledge in the context of the bigger puzzle. For many, that's what they need to keep them focused.
Although, how are these organized? The colors seem to imply some kind of grouping, but besides "the big 3" at the top, the rest seems to be a random order. Maybe group by alphabet, or front end/back end, frameworks, tools, level of skill required, etc. Finding what I was looking for took a little scrolling, no big deal. I appreciate the resource and I will definitely be using it more.