Giving Yourself Stakes

Say you were getting into web design and development right now. What’s the best way to get going? Dave and I talked about that on the last ShopTalk Show.

My best advice: give yourself some stakes.

Build something that matters to you, at least a little bit. The classic is to make yourself a personal website. That’s real. That means the things you learn you can attach to a real project. If you learn about heading tags in HTML, you can think about how to apply headings to your personal website. If you learn about backgrounds in CSS, you can think about how to do something cool with backgrounds on your personal website. And so on.

Plus that personal site gives you more opportunities for projects as you go.

For instance, I saw Manton Reece chucked up a page to track how many of the Texas State Parks he’s visited. What a cool little idea! It’s personal, so it’s of interest, and it’s public, so it has stakes. Let’s say you learn about content strategy, what might you apply to a project like this? Let’s say you learn about image optimization, can you apply those things to the images on a page like this? What if you wanted to add ratings for different attributes at each park, how might you store that data? Maybe you can learn about that. If you were doing it, would each park have a separate URL, or would it be one big list? How do you navigate it? Thinking about your own projects tends to be kinda fun and rewarding in a way a project handed to you doesn’t always.

If you do respond better to provided curriculum though, it’s notable that Frontend Masters has a straight-up free Bootcamp you can do.