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.

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?

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?

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.

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.