Alright, so you’re learning to code and you feel like you’ve got a relatively good grasp of the fundamentals, you’ve done a few tutorials and they confirm that from a theoretical standpoint: you got this!
Well, that’s good news…so what’s next? Maybe some more challenging tutorials to really put your knowledge to the test? Perhaps we send out some resumes to companies telling them we’d be on board for some intern/unpaid work to “try things out”? …Oh no, my sweet little birdie…it’s time to spread your wings and fly! “When people are learning anything new (and coding is not unique in this regard), …there’s often a lot of fear or trepidation: the unknown, the new, is kind of…it’s anxiety-provoking for people, especially career-oriented choices.”
Just Jump In, Man… Now full disclosure here, when we’re advocating “jumping in”, we’re assuming 1-That you’ve done our courses (shameless plug), which are designed to take advantage of over almost 3 decades in the business and to prepare you quickly and efficiently to handle almost any problem right out of the gate, or 2- That you’re trained to the gills and really just don’t know what you’re next step is. “A good course will give you the confidence to feel that you can move forward and actually do something for real. [When] you can build responsive a website, you’re ready to go. Do you know everything? No. But you’re ready to go.” “You learn so much more by building real-world projects for real people as opposed to walking through tutorials. Because what you’re going to learn: a big part of being a developer is interacting/speaking/communicating with the client; figuring out problems along the way.”
The VLOG goes into more detail and closes with a really nice bit of advice, which we recommend checking out, but it wouldn’t be a great VLOG if we didn’t have a mind-bending, super mario galaxy-inspired shot at the end, which we also recommend checking out. -Enjoy!
Does it make sense to use open source software … or should you write all your software from scratch?
Ask any grizzled old veteran of any industry if it’s best to build from scratch and they’ll more often than not say ‘Hhhhaaaaiiiiyyyyyllll no!’ “The last thing you want to do is reinvent the wheel.”, but hopefully they’ll have a funky beard and a Texan accent…no wait, I’m thinking of a prospector, yup. Sorry.
But the same answer can be applied (sans accent, I guess) to the question, is it better to build from scratch or use open source software? “The last thing you want to do is write code that someone has already written. …Remember when you’re using a high level language like JAVAscript or PYTHON or PHP…you’re using somebody else’s code; …you’re actually using code based on other code. This notion that it’s best to rewrite from scratch, it’s something that young developers have…”
Is there a time when you don’t want to use open source code? Absolutely, and I’ll let the VLOG do the explaining for that. Plus, there’s some sweet top-down car riding all over Montreal with a 360 camera. Check it out, and when in doubt, remember the three rules of software development: 1. Reuse 2. reUSE 3.REUSE -Enjoy!
Starting a business can be very exciting and it can also be very challenging. “You gotta figure out what the business model is going to be, …figure out what product or service you’re going to sell and how you’re going to deliver that product or service in an efficient manner so that you can make money.”
We’re going to give to the short version here but for the most robust version we recommend you check out our entrepreneur course, you won’t regret it. We cover everything from different business types to generating new ideas for businesses, etc, etc.
But that being said, let’s jump into it: Skillz that killz: No matter where or how you learn to code, it’s going to be one of your most important skills; almost like a superpower. Businesses need online presence and they more than likely are “going to be dependent on sort type of software.” See where we’re going with this? Even if you run a travel site, someone going to have to program your search engine and SEO (search engine optimization).
Keep an [eagle] eye out: You may hate your job, but guess what? You’ve probably been there for so long that you know all the ins and outs and what’s lacking and what needs improvement. You could develop an app or a technology that improves how that industry operates and suddenly you’re not working there anymore and now they’re one of your clients. Find your niche, learn everything you can about it and how you can improve it.
Hitting a wall is okay: If every business succeeded right out of the gate, then I guess everyone would be millionaires that had businesses and we’d all be…okay, I don’t know where I’m going with this but the point is it’s okay to hit walls or have little spills and make mistakes. “I believe that if you follow certain basic principles in business and you’re persistent and you manage your finances well; you manage your psychology well, it’s inevitable you will be successful. But you have to expect there’s going to be some work in the beginning…”.
The VLOG goes into a nice little car-chat about some of the ins-and-outs of your business venture but again, check out the link below to our outstanding and experience-based ‘complete entrepreneur’. It’s definitely worth your time.
What kind of highly complex and crazy work will you be doing? The answer may surprise you…
So what is the most common web developer job that is going to be out there in 2019? Are you gonna be building the next FACEBOOK from NODEjs or the next WordPress.com with PHP? The short answer is…maybe, but probably not…
“The most likely situation is you’re going to be working with small to medium sized businesses. Web developers will be building wordpress-based sites with custom mini apps, perhaps. You might be modifying shopify sites and deploying those for people.” Not as glamorous as you thought, is it? Well, it’s the truth…
Think of your standard web developer “…like a GP in the medical [professional]. You got medical doctors that are general practitioners, they don’t specialize in brain surgery, which would be kind of the equivalent of a NODEjs master or a PHP-Laravel master. The most common doctor out there is the GP (general practitioner): someone who takes care of most people’s medical needs. That is what a web professional is, you might do a Paypal integration, another day you might do a WordPress theme customizer…this is where a lot of the professional web-based jobs are gonna be.”
Don’t get us wrong, there’ going to be plenty of work building highly complex apps from scratch, “… but at the end of the day for every advanced app that’s built with NODEjs, there’s going to be five hundred, maybe thousands of jobs where you’re going to modify and build up a WordPress-based site, or work on a Shopify site for somebody.”
The VLOG really does this subject justice, including an answer to the common question of money. Specifically why does the NODEjs master make as much as the common web developer who’s just modifying Shopify or WordPress, etc. and it’s a good answer. -Enjoy!
So you’re a wordpress ‘dabbler’, maybe you use HTML or CSS to install plugins or themes? Maybe you do a little work for people and make a little bit of cash? …Maybe you realize you can make a lot more money if you knew more.
If this sounds like you then you’ve probably come across two options: learn PHP or learn JAVAscript/Node? And as a freelancer, you’ve probably got some other things on the go, time is money and you don’t have the time to learn them both. Well we gotcha…
“If you want to become a complete WordPress developer, which means a lot more contracts …then of course you gotta learn PHP because WordPress is built with PHP…you’re going to have to learn some JAVAscript if you’re going to be working with WordPress, but it’s not nearly as important.” Don’t get us wrong JAVAscript and Node are useful and have their applications, but learn PHP. Another reason being that “PHP is going to open up a huge number of opportunities in that regard.” So, sweet bonus…
Check out the VLOG for some more detailed responses to this question and if you’re really interested, we offer a kick-ass course where you can become a complete web developer fast. You would be given the tools to learn and to use most programming languages (PHP included) with speed and efficacy <link at the bottom>. -Enjoy
So PHP has jumped from version 5.6 to 7…which means they skipped (version) 6. Interesting? Maybe, but wanna know what’s really cool? It’s almost 50% faster and now PHP has jumped up to version 7.3. Why should you even care? Well for starters STUDIO WEB, our kick-ass course that helps you learn to code fast and efficiently, yet is somehow packed with learning and exercises solving problems you will encounter in the real world (Whoa! that was a lot of shameless promo, apologies!), that runs on PHP and when we moved up from 7 to 7.3 we saw a 15% increase in speed and big reduction in memory requirements (aka footprint). Which means you can learn at an even faster rate while having your load times cut practically in half (okay, that’s the promo stop line, right here. Sorry.).
It should come as no surprise really, “the PHP community are working hard to optimize and to bring PHP to a higher level.” Possibly because for a few years PHP was getting really bad press, due to most people thinking PHP was still using version 3 (not their best version). However, “PHP is a very very capable language. Facebook was created with PHP as an example…Most dynamic sites are driven by PHP, they’re putting a lot of effort into optimizing the core language…so you see this huge speed increase at run time…PHP takes much less RAM and memory…it’s much quicker”.
So there it is. The VLOG is pretty much just us loving PHP and talking it up but you get to see my dapper mug…and blink and you’ll miss it…maybe the most subtle and pacified dig at RUBY yet? -Enjoy!
With more and more people accruing astronomical student loan debt, many wonder is education really better than real world experience.
Full transparency:. 1. This is mostly an American/North America problem. 2. Not all higher learning institutions are created equal. 3. We are talking mostly about software engineers. 4. There will be shameless plugs to our online courses.
If you’ve been a young adult on this planet in the last 120 years, you’ve heard the sales pitch: Go to school, get a degree/diploma, get a really good job, make money, get married, buy a house, settle down and pump out 2.5 kids and get a dog…maybe a cat. And we’ve all accepted and railed against this pitch to varying degrees. But more and more (and this is especially prevalent in the US and Canada), graduates are leaving colleges and universities with astronomical student debts and <almost> worthless degrees. Which in turn begs the question; ‘What did I do with the last 3-5 years of my life if I can’t get a job in my field of study?’
Now I feel I need to say that this is not always the case for everyone. And there are fields like medicine where higher learning and degrees are expected and can be worthwhile, but let’s talk about software engineers…and maybe people with philosophy degrees…sorry, artistic types.
I’ll get to the point quickly because if you’ve just graduated a 3 year program at $30K/year you either don’t have time to read all of this at your 9-5 entry level job you had to take to pay back your almost $100K student debt or you really should stop reading this and go back to looking for a job to pay it off… But that’s the problem isn’t it? You have this crazy debt and no guarantee of a job in your field, while someone who hasn’t gone to college or university, and has taken a well put together online course…like STUDIO WEB ( sorry, that was shameless), has completed the course in way less time than you, has had time to garner real world experience and is now just as qualified, if not more so, to work in your field.
This has a lot of people wondering is a higher learning degree worth it? Look, I know it’s hard for colleges and universities, they have a lot of staff to pay; academic and administrative. They have curriculum that take long to approve, which almost always guarantees that the knowledge being passed down to you is dated or even irrelevant. While courses being offered online for less than half the price of admission, or even just going in with no education but ability to jump in and get your hands dirty has gotten others to better positions in the field in (sometimes) way less time.
Check out the VLOG for an almost surgical analysis of this subject. Heads up, it’s a meaty one. But there are article quotes read and then in depth experiences that are shared. We’re not saying to not get your education or to drop out if your already…institutionalized? All we’re saying is to weigh your options, look at the market (in your field), and think of what is really important in that field; most times while education is an important foundation, real world experience wins out almost every time. And if you can take our awesome STUDIO WEB courses, and our freelance courses (<links at the bottom>/ Shameless promo #2, sorrynotsorry…) and get that foundation in months, that would leave you way more time to accrue that oh-so-sought after real world experience…
Look we’ve all been there, man… You’ve got a task to do and you don’t feel like doing it. You put it off… you do the dishes (maybe even clean your entire house), or just play video games and go down youtube’s rabbit hole…
It’s procrastination: pure and simple. You’ve fought it since you were 13 years old and had a 15 page essay to write, due in 2 weeks. But as a dev or a programmer; new or veteran, you’ve got a job to do and you can’t just put things off (for too long, anyway…).
Let’s start off by trying to understand procrastination and then we’ll go into some techniques to combat it…well, ONE technique really but it’s pretty effective. When it come to procrastination there are really 3 problems at play and you could have one, both or all mixed in a cocktail of “I’ll get to it later…”, which is a terrible cocktail cuz it never gets made <baddum-ching>.
1- Fear: Ah yes, that old chestnut… But yeah, fear this isn’t going to work, fear that you’re not going to go anywhere or that you’re missing out on other things, etc, etc. 2- Being Overwhelmed: There’s too much to do, too much to learn, etc… 3- Boredom: This one is pretty insidious. We don’t really have the end goal planned out (the job we’re going to get/money we plan on making, the skill we’ll have learned, etc.).
The key answer for all these problems and procrastination in general is something your mom or even your teacher might have told you (and believe me, I hate to admit they were onto something too)…
…Do 20 minutes a day…
I know it’s so simple you almost have to laugh but it’s true. Doing 20 minutes a day of any activity has so many benefits but I’m only going to list a few here: -It’s an easy to achieve goal. 20 minutes can go by pretty fast and if you find yourself ‘getting into it’ and want to take longer, you can! -You tend to learn much more quickly if you expose yourself on a frequent basis to that activity you need to get done. Some interesting math: 20 minutes a day for 5 days a week (cuz we need our weekends) is 100 minutes. That frequent exposure is going to help your brain learn faster and more effectively than 200 minutes once a week.
I can’t even begin to tell you the length at which this is covered in the VLOG and shameless self promotion: 20 minutes a day is roughly how long the lessons in our courses (link below) are structured for, so don’t have to sit there for hours wondering when it will end with a fried brain. Check it out…after the video game, heh. Enjoy!
We received an email from someone recently who hasn’t worked in the field for about 10 years now. They have a computer science degree and are wondering about our courses and what they need to get themselves seen in today’s market…
The advice in this VLOG is good for both people returning to the fold and for those just starting out, but I’m going to cherry-pick a few good starters to <hopefully> whet your appetite…
– “In the last ten years the big change in the web development field has been front-side development: HTML5, CSS3, etc. and how people work with front-side frameworks a lot more than they did 10 years ago…”
-Freelance work or not, you should have some sort of website up and running. Designer or code-monkey, get something that “legitimizes your profession”.
– Our courses (links at the bottom) teach the basics, it’s true, but we also teach how to build “simple but real-world projects”, that way you can launch right into it. So in other words, “you won’t be building facebook (yet), but definitely the beginnings of facebook.”
-As a freelancer PHP is a good way to go because a lot of small businesses use PHP, but you’ll also get a well rounded education on the “fundamentals”, so you can use whatever you need to get the work done efficiently and quickly.
There’s sooo much more that is touched on in the VLOG and you would really be doing yourself a favor to check it out. In the meantime, check out the links below to the courses we offer. Whether you’re the new kid on the block, curious about freelancing or a grizzled old veteran who just wants to sharpen their skills, we have something for everyone.
People tend to fall into “camps” when it comes to programming languages, operating systems, etc. They swear by a certain operating system or only code with a certain programming language… Simply put, if this is you, you’re going to have a bad time…
To use an analogy, “If I was doing home repairs…[I see] we’ve got some nails to hammer, I’m not going to pull out my screwdriver…”. “When you become a professional developer, you’re going to be language neutral. You’re going to look at all these languages as tools to leverage depending on the circumstance.”
Broken record time: it’s all about fundamentals. Learn your fundamentals, “…because every language, every technology has it’s purpose or has it’s strong points and weak points…with some exceptions, some technologies are just dated…and they’re old school and you’re not gonna use them anymore.”
Generally speaking “noobish developers will say that this language is the best and everything else sucks, and if somebody tells you that on youtube or anywhere else, you know by definition they’re noobs (…except for us LOL).”
Check out the VLOG for some other really fun analogies and a sweet dig at RUBY. It wouldn’t be right if we didn’t dig at it every now and then… Go out there, try it all and save the camping for summer vacation or FPS games!
