Stop being the Idea Guy

Everyone has their reasons for wanting to learn web development. Some want to work as a web developer at a company. Some want to just be up with the times and don't want to be left behind. Some think it will add value to their resume.

For me, I wanted to stop being the Idea Guy. I've always been the Idea Guy; the one that has the ideas but no knowledge of how to build it. I hired developers to build everything for me. Plenty of my ideas have worked out and made money, but I was still always just the Idea Guy.

Learning to build web apps was my way of escaping the monicker of always being the Idea Guy. Why did I want to stop being the Idea Guy? Because having ideas is the least valuable part of building something meaningful. Ideas are cheap. Execution, the ability to make ideas come to life, is where the action is.

Update #1 regarding the New Method learning handbook

I'm excited, folks. The handbook is coming along really well. I have a detailed outline of all the content: every chapter, section, lesson, and project. I've written the first two introductory chapters that cover lots of foundational instructions as well as guides for how to use the handbook and what to expect. Read more about the scope and purpose of the handbook.

But the content of the handbook is only part of the cause for my excitement over this project.

Feedback has been excellent. Every beginner web developer I've talked to recognizes the problem of attempting to learn web development online on your own. It's apparent to any adult who's tried to teach themselves web development.

Master this one skill to become a web developer

I maintain a deeply held conviction that there is only one skill that you must master to become a web developer. It's something that I've struggled to understand all my life. It's a skill that I learned while training for my first triathlon in 2011 and I relearned when raising my son.

Without this skill, you'll accomplish nothing in life. And the web development trade will always be just out of reach if you don't master this skill first.

Ok, enough teasing. What is it?

Why you should be a web designer

I want you to be excited about learning the web design trade. It's an amazing time to be a web designer. The web has matured and standards are now prevalent, making what used to be a scattered s

I'm Erick Rodriguez and I want to be a web developer.

Hi, my name is Erick Rodriguez. I’m 31 years old. I’ve been married to a beautiful woman for 5 years. I have a two year old son and another son that will be here in a few weeks. I work full time for a large equipment and machinery company in Illinois. Along with all the responsibilities that come with what I listed above, I want to be a web developer.

Use Sharpies to keep your wireframes messy

You may know that I'm a fan of using Sharpies for wireframing layouts instead of specialty wireframing apps like Balsamiq or Mockingbird. I stated several reasons for my Sharpie affections a couple weeks ago in a post called Cheap, powerful desktop and mobile wireframing tools.

This time I want to hone in on one major benefit to using Sharpies for your initial wireframes. Messiness.

Cool Tools: Adobe BrowserLab

BrowserLab is a free service from the good people at Adobe which lets you see how a page is rendered in various browsers. You can test in Chrome, Firefox, Safari and Internet Explorer 8 & 9. One neat feature is that you can view how your site is rendered by 2 different browsers either side-by-side or using the onion skin view.

Note: The service does require you to create a free account with Adobe.

How to build a personal runway when starting an online business

Many people are learning web development with the goal of building an online business. The lure of "automatic income" from an online product is enticing, but building an online business is much different than building a traditional business.

In particular, it's easy for would-be Internet entrepreneurs to underestimate how long it will take to make a living with your new business. I was reminded of how dangerous this pitfall can be when I saw What It Feels Like to Launch a Startup With Two Weeks of Runway and the subsequent Hacker News conversation.

What is a personal runway?

A personal runway is the amount of money you'll need to support yourself and your family until your business can pay you enough to take over that burden or you can find investors to foot the bill.

Big wins, big fails, and other lies we tell ourselves

Amy Hoy is creeping up my list of people I respect. She has incredible insight into building web apps, shipping products, and being successful at things in general. All of these things are values shared by the New Method community. So when Amy talks about something, I tend to listen.

This time she discusses the lie of winning big, failing big, how we trick ourselves into caring about the wrong things, and the power of habits among other things. This time though, she does it with a video, which shows a little of her personality. You can hear the drive in her voice. It's cool.

Check out the KhanAcademy redesign

KhanAcademy is the juggernaut of free, online-only education. They're massive and growing. They're tagline is "learn almost anything for free" and I don't doubt it with over 4,000 videos and lessons.

They redesigned their website and it now does a much better job of communicating what KhanAcademy is all about. Plus, it's mega-responsive. Adjust your browser size to see it flex with the viewport.

This Week at Treehouse: Forum Search

The big news at Treehouse this week, is that the Treehouse forum added the much requested, search feature.

This was part of a larger update to the forum which included:

• Featured filter, Treehouse's answer to stick posts.


• Unanswered filter, to see threads which have 0 replies


• Badges were added next to the names of Treehouse Staff and moderators

In other news, Treehouse quietly launched a new video series Web Academy, which is in partnership with hosting provider Media Temple.

This series expands the existing Quick Tips feature on the Treehouse blog into a video series, which focuses on the hosting side of creating web sites. A common theme in the series is the topic of performance, so far there have been videos on improving performance: in your JavaScript, by using gzip compression, by using CSS sprites and using CSS & JavaScript minifying techniques.

How a duck can help you solve problems

I'm serious. A duck can help you solve problems. To be clear, I'm not saying a duck can solve your problems, but ducks do have a knack (quack?) for helping you solve your own problems. It's real. Stop laughing.

Here's how it works.

Get a non-living duck. Rubber ducks are super popular, but stuffed formerly-living ducks or stuffed never-lived-before ducks work just as well. Put it on or near your desk. When you get stuck on a problem, ask the duck for help. Voila!

Why beginner web developers should write as much as possible

I'm a big fan of writing as a way to reinforce the things you learn, celebrate your successes, learn from mistakes, help others, and see how far you've come. In fact, I believe in the discipline of chronicling your learning journey enough to make it a key feature of the future of New Method. I already have two aspiring web developers lined up to blog their learning journey on New Method and hope to have many more. I want New Method to be a place where beginner web developers can talk about their journey, the personal side of it, not just the technical side of it.

Writing about your learning journey shouldn't be hard, either. It should feel natural. It should feel like updating a friend about how your newfound education is coming along. So, because I like lists, here are a few ideas of things your can write about while you're learning web development:

How to gain experience as a beginner: Build something

Learning web development is tough, but getting paid to be a web developer is a whole different challenge. If you've just learned (or still learning) web development, how do you gain the experience you'll need to land a paying gig or even get a full-time job?

New Video Lesson at Code School: Deploying with Heroku

I'm a big fan of Code School, even though I haven't covered them much here on New Method. They have a similar mix of video lessons and in-browser coding that Treehouse has. However, Code School tends to be aimed more at intermediate web developers with a heavy focus on learning languages and advanced techniques.

Their latest release is an example of their leaning toward intermediate. It's a short video lesson on deploying a web app to Heroku, a popular web app hosting platform. I watched it. It's good. From their marketing email:

"Because of its elegant deployment environment, Heroku is the most popular hosting solution for Rails applications. In this screencast, Jay McGavren shows you how to set up a basic Rails application for deploying with Heroku. You will also learn the ideal workflow and best practices for maintaining your app on the platform."

You'll need a free Heroku account, a web app to deploy, and basic Git knowledge for this lesson to make sense.

The New Method Handbook for Learning Web Development

Have you decided to learn web development, but don’t know where to start or what path to follow? You're not the only one. Learning web development is hard, especially as an adult with other responsibilities.

Just making the decision to learn web development creates a thousand questions. Your first step may have been Google, which gave you about 311,000,000 results ranging from college courses to YouTube tutorials. Maybe you asked some web developer friends and they pointed you to books on HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Ruby, or Python.

There's a plethora of content options for learning web development, but making sense of all of it is overwhelming.

Coding Bootcamps: Interview with CEO of Bloc, Roshan Choxi

Part of my journey to learn web development involved a brief stint with Bloc. Since my experience was limited, and almost a year ago, I decided to connect with them again to see how things have changed. Their CEO and cofounder, Roshan Choxi, was nice enough to bring me up to speed on Bloc's recent past and give me a glimpse into their future.

Bloc is a programmer bootcamp, but they're quite a bit different from competitors like Dev Bootcamp, Starter League, or Hacker School. I'll let Roshan clarify.

Bad experience with online programming school LearnStreet

The "learn programming online" space is growing fast. With Treehouse, Codecademy, Code School, Coursera, Udemy, Khan Academy and others, LearnStreet has some stiff competition. Let's take a look at how they stack up.

LearnStreet is pretty new. They launched in public beta in the Fall of 2012 with a million dollars in funding after some time building their idea at a startup incubator. That bodes well for them. It means they have time to build, get feedback, and tweak their product. Considering that their competition has been mostly been around for a year or more, they have a lot of ground to make up. Others were already boasting tens or hundreds of thousands of users before LearnStreet was a blip on the radar.

An introduction to front-end frameworks

Front-end frameworks can be great or awful, depending on what you're trying to do. They're great if you need to get something basic up-and-running quickly. But if you're building something more intricate and you want more control over the specifics of the layout, front-end frameworks add unnecessary heft.

What is a front-end framework?

Front-end frameworks come in many variations. There are the minimalist types, like Semantic or Unsemantic, and there are the more robust types, like Foundation and the famous Bootstrap. And then there are lists with a bunch more.

Einstein on learning efficiently

Never memorize something that you can look up.

Cheap, powerful desktop and mobile wireframe tools

There are a lot of wireframe tools floating around. Just Google "top wireframe tools list" and you'll see what I mean.

Most wireframe tools have taken a simple concept (illustrating the general layout and flow of an application or website) and made it a complicated mess. This is a perfect example of features getting in the way of a simple job to be done.

I've tried a dozen or so wireframe tools, from Keynote to Balsamiq, and the best tool I've found for making wireframes on the desktop is still my trusted Sharpie. It's cheap, powerful, mobile, and comes in many colors. Here's what you can do with a Sharpie:

How to use Treehouse and Codecademy together (jQuery example)

While many see Treehouse and Codecademy as competitors, I see them as the perfect compliment to one another. One is excellent for learning introductory concepts slowly with a human "teacher". The other is excellent for moving quickly through the nuts and bolts of a concept. Together, you can learn individual concepts thoroughly without having to "Google around" for more tutorials.

Let's use jQuery as an example programming language (really, it's a JavaScript library) that you can learn with both Treehouse and Codecademy.

A simple explanation of TDD (test-driven development)

When I first started learning web development, TDD (test-driven development) was a huge buzzword. It was gaining lots of traction as a development methodology and best practice and Hacker News was constantly flooded with new perspectives on the subject. My problem was that, after reading so many opinions, I still didn't have a decent grasp of what TDD was.

Cool: Treehouse uses CodePen for "Code Playground"

I'm a fan of Treehouse. They do great stuff on a regular basis. They're arguably the best place online to learn web development and their growing student body of 25,000+ aspiring web developers is proof.

How to bring content design back into your UX design process

Content design isn't necessarily part of an aspiring web developer's immediate learning plan, but getting a sense for other disciplines in your industry will make you a more well-rounded developer. And since you should be learning UX design anyway, it's good to know this stuff. For the purposes of this post, content refers primarily to copy, not other content elements like images or icons.

UX design has been overly deconstructed to its basic parts; wireframes, mind maps, and user stories. The role of content in UX design has been lost, left to the last item on the todo list before a website ships. Content managers have been relegated to mere copywriters, pumping out words like widgets in a factory. It's no wonder business writing sucks.

Udemy explodes with "experts" teaching online

The Next Web reports that Udemy, a marketplace connecting experts with paying students, has signed on 15,000 new experts during January and February of this year. That's a lot of experts.

Although I feel like this press release devalues the term "expert", I am very intrigued at what it might mean for online education. If Udemy is able to find students for all those experts, then we'll see the tide toward online education shift even further.

Codecademy offers project lessons with real APIs

Working with APIs is becoming a standard aspect of web development. I built a "simple" web app late last year that pulls photos from Instagram and Facebook. Working with their respective APIs was a learning curve I didn't expect. I had to learn about HTTP requests, how to read their documentation, and how to build my own app to accept the information their APIs returned.

3 smart people you should follow

Every once in a while, I'll list three smart people worth following on the Internet. They will invariably relate to web development or independent learning.

Eric Weinstein works at Codecademy. His title is Content Architect. I could surmise what that means, but all I really know is that his Ruby course on Codecademy is the best I've encountered anywhere. He also has a personal site.

Ryan Carson is the founder of Treehouse. He also founded Carsonified, blogs excellently on his personal site, and founded a collection of incredibly popular conferences on web design. He's a beast.

Chris Coyier is a web developer and blogger behind CSS-Tricks. He co-founded Codepen.io, which I'm a big fan of. He also does a podcast and stuff like that.

Making the jump from salary to freelance

Learn better by cycling your intensity

When learning web development I found a special trick that worked well for me and still works today. It improves my retention of lessons, reduces fatigue, removes the risk of burnout, and doesn't sacrifice momentum. I started cycling my intensity.

Doing it wrong

When I first started learning web development, I tried to stuff it all in my head as fast as possible. I joined Treehouse and went through a ton of lessons. I read a book on HTML and CSS like it was a textbook. I read a book on Ruby from cover to cover and highlighted half the text. I joined a developer bootcamp called Bloc to learn even faster. I did Codecademy lessons and read as much online as my eyes could stand.

Choosing a winning color palette

I suck at building color palettes from scratch. I've read a dozen tutorials and watched a handful of videos and if you asked me to put together 5 colors that look great together I couldn't. I think building great color palettes is a genetic predisposition, like drawing or writing good poetry or liking mushrooms. If you're not born with it, you won't have it.

That said, the Internet does a great job at augmenting our deficiencies. You don't have to be a color aficionado to choose a great color palette. All you need is a basic understanding of the effect of color on emotion, a little good taste, and a tool like COLOURlovers or Kuler by Adobe.

Treehouse is amazing for aspiring web developers

I dislike reviews that don't tell you the verdict until the end. I won't do that. You'll get my verdict in the very beginning, every time.

Treehouse is an online technology school and it's amazing. Anytime someone asks me the best way to learn the basics of web development, I point them to Treehouse first. It's reliable, fun, incredibly high quality, and they're always adding new content.

What you can learn

With Treehouse, you can learn web development, web design, iOS programming, Android programming, and how to start a business. The "web development" category has the most content. You can learn HTML/CSS, JavaScript/jQuery, Ruby on Rails, PHP, and even Wordpress, all through tidy packages called Learning Adventures.

Take a cool photo of your latest design

You've just finished a sweet design and you want to post a screenshot of what it will look like on an actual computer. First option: find a photo of a Macbook, drop in Photoshop, and put your design on the screen. Meh, that'll work. Second option: put your Macbook on the ground and take a picture of it. Genius.

The image above was part of Dann Petty's recent Yahoo! redesign post on Medium. There's a free PSD of the design, too. Check it out.

Having doubts is natural, maybe even good

You're taking a big step, maybe spending a lot of money, and definitely spending a lot of time learning web development. You might be taking time away from family. You have to cut back on other expenses to fit this new direction into your budget. You're taking a personal risk, too, because learning something new and trying to become something better always makes you vulnerable.

You have questions, doubts. If you don't yet, they will come.

Is all this worth it? Is it worth the investment? What if you fail and people see that you couldn't cut it? What if you learn it all and don't like the life of a web developer or your job prospects aren't what you thought they'd be? Am I even capable of becoming a web developer?

Project Euler: Advanced mathematical & programming challenges

Project Euler is like a drive-thru for experiencing the agony of solving hard problems. However, it's also a surprising rush when you do solve a problem because it means you have a decent grasp of both your programming language and basic mathematics.

The problems become increasingly difficult as you progress. The first problem took me about 5 minutes to solve with just a few lines of Ruby. The fourth problem took me 4 hours. And that's when I decided it was time to take a break for the day.

If you're feeling adventurous or have a little time on your hands and want to try something new, give Project Euler a try.

Using projects as learning tools (the right way)

Putting to practice what you've learned from a book or online lesson is a great way to reinforce and add application to the knowledge you've gained. But do a project is incredibly unhelpful advice. In fact, it only creates more questions.

What project? What kind of project? How big of a project? What should it do? What should it try to accomplish? What do I want it to teach me? Should it be something worth putting in my portfolio? How much time should it take me? With all these questions, the project has now become another obstacle to your learning success instead of an aid.

Tool of the day: Codepen.io

Codepen.io is like Dribbble for front-end developers. It's a showcase of cool things people are doing with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. It just so happens to be a great tool for quickly prototyping simple designs and design elements like buttons, gradients, shapes, etc. I use it for both inspiration (the community is full of really talented people) and as a tool to whip up designs in a hurry.

Getting help when you're stuck

When you're learning web development, or any other complicated skill, getting stuck is a dreadful experience. Often times, you're stuck so badly that you don't even know the right question to ask to get help. Posting questions on social networks can be embarrassing, annoying to your online friends, and most likely fruitless. Resorting to Google when you aren't even sure of the problem is even more frustrating.

For beginners, getting stumped can be a momentum killer. And, if it happens often enough without quick assistance, it can demotivate from learning altogether. Finding the right help in a timely manner is incredibly valuable. In fact, it's so valuable that I've been mulling over an idea to provide a real-time solution. I even bought a domain name for it: unstumped.com.

Cargo-Bot: a fun way to learn programming concepts on iPad

 

There are two ways to learn programming concepts: the fun way and this way. I've tried both and much prefer the fun way. Cargo-Bot is an iPad game that teaches programming concepts by solving increasingly difficult puzzles. However, unlike other puzzle games, this one forces you to think like a computer by limiting your options to only what a computer can do.

The best thing about Cargo-Bot is that it lets you learn programming concepts without the mental weight of learning a programming language. When I was first learning Ruby, Cargo-Bot really helped me understand for-loops, while-loops, recursive functions, arrays, and how to count (yes, you'll need to re-learn how to count when learning to program). And learning all that just felt like playing a (deceptively addictive) puzzle game.

I highly recommend Cargo-Bot if you have an iPad.

Steve Jobs on programming

I think everybody in this country should learn how to program a computer because it teaches you how to think.

An introduction to typography in web design

Typography is the art (some say science) of arranging typed words to make a language visible. In other words, typography is what makes the words on your site legible.

Although having a solid understanding of typography isn't a must-have skill to become a web developer, it is something that will spice up any site or app you design down the road. The right mix of typefaces/fonts and their styling can make a dreary design pop.

Celebrities learning to program

 

Did you know Chris Bosh of the Miami Heat learned to program? What about Will.I.Am of the Black Eyed Peas? How about Mike Bloomberg, the Mayor of New York City? Certainly, if these people can find the time and desire to learn to program, so can we.

What's more, Code.org is pushing to bring programming education into schools across the country. That's a tall order, but so very necessary.

Hello world!

Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!

When can I call myself a web developer?

Becoming a web developer is an entirely unique experience. Because the industry is advancing so quickly, you can confidently expect that you'll never be finished. If you're expecting a finish line you'll be disappointed when you realize it's just a mirage; it's not actually there.

Pitfalls of becoming a web developer: moving too fast

This is surely to be the first of many "pitfalls" posts about becoming a web developer. There are so many and an honest assessment by someone who has recently experienced them is something the Internet hasn't provided just yet.

This time I'm going to talk about an unseen and usually unexpected pitfall: moving too fast.

For aspiring web developers

I love people who are trying to become web developers. It's a hard road and they're brave for walking it. It's a road full of uncertainties, obstacles, sacrifice, face-palms, and a plenty of victories.

Becoming a web developer as an adult is even harder. You don't have the luxury of unlimited time, unlimited attention, and no bills. You have to balance your learning with spending time with family, keeping your day job, running errands, household chores, and taking care of yourself. With all those responsibilities, finding time to study on your own is double hard. Add the fact that there's no one looking over your shoulder, no accountability, no grades, and no deadlines and you have the perfect recipe for quitting a thousand times before you reach web developer status.