and feeling very stupid. I literally just started coding today. I’m not tech-savvy (AT ALL). I’m not a gamer. I didn’t even really play Pac-Man all that much when I was a kid (and I’m 45). I am, however, good at school, have a knack for languages and pick things up quickly.
I’m a massage therapist and you can guess how well that’s going with COVID-19.
I completed all 28 of HTML and HTML5 this morning. It was good and I’m digging’ it but how do I do this in ‘real life’? I have a MacBook. Where do I go? What do I do? I’m in this for the long haul. Even when I am able to go back to work I can practice at least 4+ hours each day to really learn this. I never again want to be in the position where I can’t ‘work from home’.
Is someone willing to walk me through the very, VERY basics of start-up?
Also, any books which may be valuable? The libraries are closed but I’m willing to order and wait. I really, REALLY don’t want to spend any money learning this. Especially now.
Thanks for any forthcoming assistance. Greatly appreciated. ~Suzanne
Have you gone on to the JavaScript curriculum? There’s plenty to learn there, and it’s essential for making any kind of modern website. And be sure to do the certification projects too, which will help cement your knowledge with practical application of it.
Yes, I’m literally starting from the very beginning with the Responsive Web Design Certification (300 hours). I’ve completed the first one and am re-charging my computer and taking a break before I start Basic CSS. I’m definitely going to just go in order. But, how do I work on my computer (not via FCC platform to create? That is my question.
I’d say you’re probably still in the learning phase before you can make a whole site top-to-bottom, which is what you’ll need to do as an independent freelancer. It’s okay to be weak in some of the areas, but you still need familiarity with them.
You’ll probably need to get your feet wet in terms of operations, i.e. how to create a new site from scratch and deploy it. And while you can do all these from Windows, even quite well, most of the ops culture still focuses on Linux. So you’ll want to pick up some Linux command line skills, learning the basic commands like ls, rm, mv, mkdir, find, grep, and so on. I find using Linux as a daily environment helps, only rebooting to Windows for gaming. A Mac with Homebrew is pretty much equivalent to Linux in this case.
Not long ago, you’d have to go much deeper into Linux administration to get any kind of deployment done: learning how to install and configure web servers and DNS and ssh and so on. Nowadays though I’d just suggest learning on a cloud provider like AWS, Google Cloud, or Azure (the last is more geared toward Windows users) and doing things their way, which takes away a lot of that manual work and gets you rolling with a site with minimal ceremony. All of the cloud providers have a free tier that typically lasts for a year, so there’s plenty of time to learn. And AWS at least has excellent tutorials, if not always the friendliest UI for their tools.
I use a website called https://repl.it/ to do in browser coding, if you select HTML/CSS/JS as a new repl you can code in all 3 in side hte browser and see the result straight away, you can upload graphics and other files, above the output pane is a link which you can open what you’re doing in an independent tab on the browser, which is handy to test what others will see (and for testing to make sure things work right when resizing
It is also multiplayer so that means you can invite (up to 3 other people ) to collaborate.
But yeah, just keep coding and experimenting and you will pick up new skills and improve as you go.