620 karma · joined January 19, 2017
In the console I get
> TypeError: undefined is not an object (evaluating 'twttr.widgets.load')
Today I was looking at a project one person posted on the internet. A labor of work, probably a week. One of the few comments was "Is this real? [...] This is dumb and useless."
Imagine being that person, spending a lot of time crafting something, even just for fun, being told that. You probably won't do anything like that ever again.
The best thing as a maker is finding a welcoming community and a place where even if you fail, it's not the end of the world, tomorrow is a new day and you can make something new that will succeed.
This post is so inspiring, I joined your newsletter to follow the journey!
This extension just tells me what things changed, so I can put them in another CSS file without editing the original minified CSS.
Thank you!
Seva (formerly ConvertKit) if you need more automation and you need to manage different segments.
Then the Laravel ecosystem adopted it widely, and a good Vue.js tutorial series was published on Laracasts (which also happens to host the official Laravel forum)
Hence the close link with Vue and the Laravel community.
JavaScript is fundamentally different than Python or Java.
Learn plain JavaScript alongside learning a framework - it won't bore you too much with theory and you start right away building things
> too much noise out there with dozens of frameworks
Really, for the most part, it all boils down to React, Vue and Angular. Those are the mainstream ones, then you have hundreds or thousands of alternatives, but as a beginner, you'd better stick to the most popular ones, easier to find help and libraries.
> (e.g. CoffeeScript, TypeScript, JSX, etc)
CoffeeScript is no longer widely used. As I see it, it was mostly a good introduction to JavaScript for Ruby developers, but I haven't seen lots of CoffeeScript projects after the recent ECMAScript releases (ES6-7-8)
Watch out for outdated tutorials: after 2015 JavaScript changed a lot.
JSX is not a language variation, but rather a different way to write templates.
Avoid getting too picky with the tooling: if using Vue, just use Vue CLI. With React, just use create-react-app
Rely on a code formatter: Prettier. Also, use ESLint to make sure you start with the right foot on code best practices
Don't fall in the dogma and cargo cult traps: listen, learn, but pick your choices
I considered beginners to the framework, rather than to frontend development altogether - I think an npm/yarn intro would have helped, it's difficult to know where to stop and avoid going into a rabbit hole to explain all the things you're "supposed" to know when entering the JS frontend dev realm.
Good points!
Below the form the intent is clear, but you should also be allowed to only get the ebook without having any further email from me.
HN is probably not the target audience for my email list, which is more beginner-oriented, and a low percentage of HN users will leave their email there.
It's best to make the material available free of any kind of wall and let people jump in the mailing list if they enjoy it and want more.
EDIT: here's the ebook link https://www.dropbox.com/s/ai7j5ei0f24aoz6/The%20Vue.js%20Han...
https://www.dropbox.com/s/ai7j5ei0f24aoz6/The%20Vue.js%20Han....
You can go through 10 tutorials and think you "got" something, until you need to articulate it and you realize maybe you missed some step. Of course I'm generalizing, but I also find this process helps "stick" things into my mind. I might completely forget something 1 week from now if I don't put it into writing.
I also find a huge waste keeping things on my computer, so I publish them. I started doing this on my blog https://flaviocopes.com with the things I knew already, and of which I had already lots of notes spread around, and then when I got "tired" of this I turned this into learning new things as well. I mix and match these approaches.
Sometimes I go into "series" of posts to dive into a tech for many days in a row.
I might search something on Google and spend 1 hour looking for the correct answer on SO or other blogs, and when I finally get the "canonical" one buried somewhere, or some different but valid solutions, I write a blog post to make it my canonical in the future (I find I very often reference my posts and update them as I go).
Writing down things as a learning process is worth it even if you just target yourself. I don't write to teach anyone. I write to learn, then if the result is good I think it's a disservice not to share the work with others.
Then I agree that crappy tutorials are not worth sharing most of the times. If you target beginners it's cool to write basic stuff, but it should be a nicely crafted content rather than rushing things and copy/pasting examples taken from somewhere else.
While listening to podcasts or get an idea while walking around, I record using the iPhone Voice Memos.
I then reprocess those recordings from time to time and put the gist into written words.
When I'm doing some brain dump on random ideas I use MindNode Pro.
Notion (notion.so) is a pretty great app for keeping a record of everything, from random text to lists and tables. Has cool interlinking features and works on Web/Mac/iOS (and possibly others but I didn't check)
It's paying off in terms of traffic, as last week I got over 2k visits from Google alone, but more importantly I learned a ton in the past few months, because of the continuous process of learning / building something / testing / writing / revising / incorporating feedback / repeat the next day.
Sometimes I think I know something, only to realize later that I only barely scratch the surface of a topic, and there's a lot of things underneath.
How do I find the time - I started waking up 2 hours earlier than what I used to do. Made all the difference.
Agree with the write for yourself mindset.
I am kind of doing the same thing on my blog https://flaviocopes.com where I write every single day (personal challenge) about some particular thing related to Web programming, and I mainly write for me, because I don't have a good long term memory and every time I need to use X I reference what I learned n months ago about it. That's much better than searching again and again "that post" you remember that clarified the thing for you.
Turns out this is useful for other people too, as I can see in the positive feedback I get.
After some time I started rewriting old posts to improve them / add more things I learned, as your writing style evolves.
So, my advice is, just start and stick to it.
11 years ago I started a personal blog where I put all I was learning, and that led to several contacts that made me start contracting as I finished my studies. The blog is now dead, but it was a continuous source of inquiries emails, and this was not about rocket science, but about some basic Web Development topics.
Without it maybe I would have never started going "solo".
Shameless plug, I write daily about JavaScript and frontend development topics on my blog https://flaviocopes.com, with a very beginner-friendly style.
I don't have prepared learning plans _yet_, but I plan to work on that very soon, certainly before this summer, as a way to navigate my tutorials and go from level X to level Y.
You don't have to have WordPress as the go-to resource for everything, but also you don't really have to roll your own CMS every time you build up a site, which is quite a time consuming task.
Grav offers a light experience to a CMS, and you can decide if you want to just work with markdown files, or rely on the Admin panel for easier editing.
(Disclosure: I'm a dev team member).
We were not actively involved in the posting, but it had a fantastic effect on our user base, we went from 1600 GitHub stars to 3k+ thanks to it (now we're close to 6k), plus it allowed a snowball effect on Twitter and other websites, that lasted for weeks.
The whole "happening" was described in https://getgrav.org/blog/grav-reaches-3000-github-stars
I wouldn't know how to post it on PH myself and get a similar effect. The product was discovered and featured by a prominent hunter that found it interesting / worth featuring, and had success thanks to that.