I am the master of false-starts. I set out to do something and within the first week I second-guess myself and usually wind up back at the drawing board. This website is no exception. I still wish to conquer Javascript, but rather than limit my aspirations to javascript development I want to make this blog a journey into web development as it is practiced today by the pros.

This means that I am not only going to study javascript, but will also take the time to brush up on my HTML/CSS, as much has changed in recent years. Gone are the days when a web development project began with cracking notepad open and cranking out vanilla HTML/CSS. Now you crank up the command-line, summon something called Gulp or Grunt, download your NPM modules, fire up your preprocessors and templating engines, blast some Git commands etc etc etc. Web development today has become a bewildering tooling process where what you use to even begin coding a product requires a lot more thought than what I learned back in 2006.

I spent weeks and weeks scouring online resources to find project-based resources that are complete free. The end result will be a rocking portfolio to show clients/employers, with dozens of finished projects. These will mostly be focused on HTML/CSS/JS. Starting with simple static websites while learning how to level up my workflow using tools like the Command Line, npm, build systems like Gulp, and supplementing my html/css knowledge with frameworks like bootstrap, and CSS processors like SASS. I will even dabble in Jade and Jekyll along the way while pushing commits to github. These are all confusing technologies that courses like codecademy etc ill-equip you for. Once I get that out of the way, I will venture into building LAMP/MEAN stack websites, and take on building full-featured web apps and mobile apps.

I could go on and on, but let’s dive right into it. Next stop, a brief introduction to the world of online tutors before leading into my first project.