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comment by user-inactivated
user-inactivated  ·  2472 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Pubski: June 21, 2017

Webflow seems damn good for rapid prototyping - something rezzeJ and I started talking about at the beginning of this thread. I've been looking for something like this for a while.

As for career advice: I'll remind you that I'm just an amateur designer. I don't do comissions of any sort, though I might enjoy the opportunity when I get there. I design things in part because I believe I have [good taste](zenpencils.com/comic/90-ira-glass-advice-for-beginners/) for it, and it part because I've gotten what I consider pretty good with it for an amateur (no portfolio to link to yet, but that's about to change).

If you think I still can help you, feel free to PM me.





weewooweewoo  ·  2464 days ago  ·  link  ·  

I'm sorry to take a long time about getting back to you. I've had it in my head to redo my portfolio before messaging you (it needs to be updated for clients soon), but I've been overloaded in the last week.

I'm mostly just curious about the front-end development track. I am frozen by the amount of learning choices, and then you read shit like "the state of javascript in 20XX" and I get more confused about if I even want to learn how to code things.

On one hand, you're right in that the tool I use is good for prototyping, I hear that a lot- but wtf, everything I make is just prototype! That's terrifying as hell to me.

I guess this is difficult, because I don't really have any questions, other than, how did you pick up the frond end knowledge that you know?

rezzeJ  ·  2463 days ago  ·  link  ·  

In terms of actual learning tools to use, I can recommend TeamTreehouse's Front-end web development track.

It starts with the assumption that you're a complete novice on everything HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. So keep that in mind and maybe just do the individual modules you want if you have some prior knowledge in certain areas.

My only real criticism of is that sometimes they hammer home the point a little too hard. Like, they make something obvious, and then explain it even more. But there's controls to speed the video up if it starts dragging a bit. Generally I've found the teaching to be of excellent quality and the live coding environment that you run along side the videos works great. You also get quizzes and code tests throughout and at the end of the modules.

If it's any sort of metric to you, I built the website in my OP after only ~2-3 weeks of doing the track. And I had no prior knowledge.

user-inactivated  ·  2464 days ago  ·  link  ·  

I started with no knowledge of JS whatsoever - the code barely made sense to me - so I took some of the more formal lessons in it, like CodeAcademy's course on JS, to start me off.

And then... basically, I wanted to make games, so I had an idea in mind and went from there: "how do I do that?". I looked through the MDN on details of what certain types can do (did you know that at certain point, you could observe changes in an object natively? they scrapped that, for some reason, but there was what you now do with auxiliary libraries) and tried my hand in crappy first designs.

Most of the projects never saw daylight because I was frankly ashamed of the results: it wasn't pretty or effective and sometimes, it didn't even do what I wanted it to. I look at some of them now and think: "Dear Heaven, did I actually write that?". However, it was those projects that made me observe and learn, and because of them I'm now a better programmer.

There were also these cool things that I wanted to do, and they mandated usage of something different from the usual JS experience. Enter the frameworks. The first one I used was AngularJS. ngJS was complicated to design as backbone for a small project and took a lot of figuring out for the JS part; HTML templating, however, was fairly simple. I have also used others briefly, perhaps just to try them out.

The most used library for me remains jQuery, simply because it makes DOM manipulation so much simpler and easier to read - and even that, I tend to exclude where it isn't mandated. I cut away everything I don't need in a project because size (and, therefore, load time) is a major concern of mine: I want to design things that are comfortable to use, and the 20+ kB of minified jQuery I'd rather replace with JS' native methods if I only need two lines of DOM change/observation.

At some point it turned that I've been following some of the stardard guides (there are several, oddly enough) inherently, because it seemed like good taste to me. I'd recommend you code the way that seems natural to you for a while, then read a few of them; take the good stuff in and leave the rest. That way, you make sure what you write makes sense to you but also follows certain common ground if you're ever to give command of your code away to another coder.

CSS came about for similar reasons: I wanted to try something - but mostly, because I can't stand a bland design. I even design my MS Word documents before any significant amount of work, whether they're to be released to public or used for personal goals. As you can see from our discussion with rezzeJ, I design every project by hand these days. I've tried Bootstrap and some others and just got confused; personally, I'd rather know what's been put into the palette because I was the one to build it. This may or may not apply to you; I'm telling you that to say that it's alright to write your own stylesheet.

Basically... do your own stuff and see what sticks. Don't be ashamed by not being able to do something: what I've done with my web dev skills in a couple of years is amazing to me, even if it's not up to the corporate standard. As with everything, strive to learn: search, ask or, if need be, develop your own. I made a timer library for a few games of mine just because I didn't see anything good on the market - and it was also a good exercise. You'll get there, just like I got where I am now. I'm actually learning PHP now, which feels exactly the same as JS did back in the day: mysterious and vague. I'm sure I'll make sense of it with rigorous enough study.

Feel free to ask any questions you might have. Also, feel free to message me if you want some designing done for your projects: I enjoy doing it, and for you, I'll do it free of charge. By the time you message me with something like that, I'll probably have a portfolio lying around.