It’s 2020. There are many, many (maybe more) web development blogs, videos and tutorials out there. And I decided to start a new one. “But why?” and “What will it be about?” you may ask…
It’s all about learning.
I loved reading and writing when I was a child. There were times I wanted to become an author. Later in school, I loved to teach and help my classmates, especially with math. I still do. Two years ago I started teaching web design and programming at university. Not only my students learned things during lectures and exercises, I did as well. Actually, I learned a lot. To prepare for classes I read a lot of blogs, tutorials and documentation about web development basics I thought I knew most about. However, it’s one thing to use your knowledge in your everyday work as a web developer and another thing to teach it to others. Explaining something to somebody else is a very good way (if not the best) to really understand what you’re doing. This is probably the main reason I want to start this blog series: to learn.
My mother tongue is German (more precisely: Austrian dialect), and I always hated and avoided writing and speaking English – until I had to because of my work. Nonetheless, there is still a lot to be improved. Publishing English texts on the web where everyone can read them is a huge step for me (that might sound silly but maybe some of you will understand), but will definitely help me get better and feel more comfortable about it. So the second reason is similar to the first one: it’s all about learning.
Screw you, impostor syndrome.
Another reason I want to start this development blog is probably the most important one for me personally: I want to fight my impostor syndrome. Some of you might know what that is, some of you might also experience it yourself. I didn’t know what it was until a few years ago, but I’m pretty sure I had to deal with it already long before then. I often have the feeling I’m not good enough at something. Even if people tell me that is not true, I can’t really accept it. As I started being self-employed just recently, I have to learn how to sell myself, my skills and my knowledge. Now, as I’m writing these lines, there’s a voice inside my head, telling me that there are so many other people who already wrote about all the things I plan to write about – and that they can surely do it better.
I now try to tell that voice that everybody explains things differently and that everybody needs different explanations of the same things to really get it. So maybe there are people out there who prefer reading my posts. And if not, well, I can write them at least for me, and the reasons mentioned above.
Let’s focus on the basics.
What will the planned blog series be about? In a world full of frameworks, technologies, libraries and tools that come and go and change all the time, I’d like to start with and focus on the basics. Good old HTML, CSS and (maybe later) also JavaScript. While working with my students, I realized that sometimes they can set up an Angular or React project without any help, even if they are new to web development. They just have to follow getting started guides, enter some commands into their terminal and they have an advanced, modern web application up and running. However, when I start asking questions about the final HTML output structure and semantics, about CSS specificity and the box model or accessibility and performance, they sometimes can’t really answer them.
I can also remember somebody telling me that “HTML and CSS is easy” (Only JavaScript is more complicated.) – but I would say: it’s obviously not (Of course my inner impostor syndrome voice started telling me “Maybe they’re right, maybe it’s not important what you’re teaching, maybe you should focus on something else”…). I recently did an advanced CSS-course and found out that there are so many new features I never heard of and that shows me that I’ll never stop learning as long as I’m working in Web development.
What’s next?
This was just an introduction and motivation about what’s coming next. I'm curious how blogging about web development will help me improve my skills and learn something new. If you want to get updates or give feedback, follow scale on Twitter. I would love to hear from you and your experiences in getting started with web development. Stay tuned for more posts!