Fastest way to be a MASTER web dev???

you want to be able to make that amazing site or make that amazing project or get hired of course and start making some money so i understand why you want to learn as quickly as possible so in this video i'm going to share my advice on learning new languages and skills for those of you who don't know me already my name is kevin and here at my channel we learn how to make the web and how to make it look good with weekly tips tricks and tutorials so first off i have some really bad news there are no shortcuts or actually no that's wrong there are shortcuts but as the name implies they cut around corners and shortcuts are things like with front-end development there are things like learning a framework instead of learning a language so maybe learning bootstrap instead of css itself the problem that then comes up is you've learned bootstrap but then you need to do something that bootstrap doesn't quite do and you need to customize it a little bit and then you're out of your realm of comfort you start wasting lots and lots of time trying to figure out how to do that customization you find it working somewhere but then it doesn't work there because it's interfering with how bootstrap is working and it starts making this big mess of code just to get it functional and you just want to pull your hair out it's really frustrating 100 or worse than that little change even is then you finish that project you finally got it working you have all your little hacks in there you managed to get it to go and then you get hired for a new project or you get brought into a new team or whatever it is and they're not even using bootstrap and you're just lost you have no idea where to start nothing makes sense so you know that that causes problem then you're starting to relearn everything and you're sort of maybe reverting back to what you knew before and it just makes things a much more difficult in the long run the same thing happens with javascript as well and i know this i learned jquery before i learned javascript i did that because it was easier or it wasn't actually easier but that's what i kept hearing is that jquery is easier and back then actually javascript was kind of hard to do some stuff with so i learned jquery first and then i started having to do more javascript stuff and i ran into this problem where i didn't really know what was native jquery or what was like only part of jquery or and what was native javascript itself and i got lost for a little while as i made that transition away from jquery but eventually i got there but it did definitely extended my learning curve more than i needed to and here i am talking about jquery maybe that ages me a little bit but i see the same thing with react these days where somebody will learn react but not learn javascript and so then they don't always know what's native javascript and what's specifically coming from react and that makes life more difficult and in the end you might have started by making stuff you know it started making things quicker because you could start doing things with react and you didn't have to learn everything but then down the road it comes back to bite you sort of like that bootstrap example what happens if in the next project you're doing you don't have react at your disposal the team's using vue instead or it's using vanilla javascript making those changes becomes very hard because you only know react instead of knowing the base language so it can definitely speed you up in the short term but in the long term you're creating a lot more work for yourself so all that to say it's really important to learn the fundamentals and learn the core skills at the beginning and when you're doing that make sure you're not limiting yourself to one medium and what i mean by that is limiting yourself to video you're here on youtube you're watching this i'm guessing you like video more than blog posts maybe and more than reading but it's really important that you don't limit yourself to just one thing when you're doing all of your learning often what it is is we're taking what we enjoy the most but it doesn't mean that's the best way to actually learn and there's all these tests out there right they tell you like oh if you've answered these questions we'll tell you what type of learner you are the reality is that we all learn best when we use mixed types of content and mix mediums so reading and watching someone do something are very very different and of course whichever method you are using don't forget to try and follow along as well now watching things because you're just trying to find out about something that's fine you want you see that there's a new feature that's available you just want to know about it and not exactly like i'm going to memorize this and be able to use it on every project i just want to be aware of it and see it in action then yeah just watch that video or skim through that blog post but if you're actively trying to learn and you're trying to learn how to do something watching a video or reading a blog post isn't going to get you to be able to do it even if you understood every single thing the person did while you were watching it or reading that blog post we think that by watching tutorials and watching videos and reading things that we're learning and of course you are learning but you're learning about things you're not learning how to do those things recently i started learning card magic and i have a book that teaches you magic tricks i could read the book i can understand exactly how to do one of the tricks and then i'd have no idea how to actually do the trick right i knew the steps i knew everything i had to do for it but i couldn't do the actual trick i would just drop you know i couldn't hold the cards properly i was figuring that out you're trying to get the placement right i understood the steps i read through them all i understood what i had to do it's very different knowing what to do and actually being able to do it and there's a huge separation there so it's different when you're doing manual tasks because you can see that right away you're trying to you you see the progression so you're feeling it whereas when you're doing something that's more in your head it's harder to make that connection you just think that by reading it or learning about it it's all there it's not how it works it's the same thing as a physical task when you're coding coding is physical right we're moving our fingers it's the same idea when you're learning some a new skill you need to be putting what you're seeing into action the learning happens when you try and implement something and when you're just watching video after video trying to learn everything you can you're learning little you're just not learning you're just information's being bombarding you and you have no idea where to start what you need to do is and we're talking about we're trying to follow along with something but you're trying you should be trying to solve a problem a lot of the time or develop on one new skill at a time when you're trying to learn everything you're learning nothing when you're trying to learn one thing well you can learn that one thing and then learn one other thing and then learn one other thing and all of a sudden you've learned a hundred new things one at a time instead of trying to learn a hundred things all at once so when you are learning these one things at a time by not immediately implementing what you're learning it's never going to sink in you really need to start implementing it as you go and implementing it doesn't mean copying and pasting from a blog post you find and then getting it to work within your project right with like a little tweak to get it to go or you know if you're following a tutorial and just following it line by line with the video playing that's that doesn't count that's following along now there's nothing wrong with following it along actually i would encourage you to actually follow along but then when you're done turn it off and use what you learned in your own project without the help of the tutorial and that leads us to actually building your own stuff and i know sometimes that can be hard to come up with a project idea or to get motivated to go on with one of your own projects instead of just following a tutorial that you found so you know see if you have any problems day to day that you can come up with your own solution for or maybe create a website for a hobby of yours or maybe web development is your hobby so make something for a hobby of one of your friends or family members or go look for ideas online there's places like front end mentor too that give you things to build the idea is there you just have to actually make it work really just building out projects anything at all but you need to be working on your own thing that's not following tutorial so you're finding your own problems and you're finding solutions to those problems and yeah finding solutions to them is a big thing googling things is not a bad thing it's actually something that developers do all the time and googling is a good skill to be developing just as you're developing all these other skills as well you are starting to work on a project where you need a little bit of javascript to do something you don't need to learn all of javascript to do that one thing you just need to learn that one thing and be able to do it and implement it in your project this sort of happened with me when i started getting into accessibility and trying to learn a little bit more about it it's something i'm still really working hard on but as i was at first trying to learn it i got into the area roles and all of that an area is such a huge topic and it overwhelmed me and i was just looking at it going i have no idea where to start and that makes you just like freeze up you don't want to actually do anything with it because you don't know where to start and when there's too much there that you don't know it's really easy just to be like you know like you you're frozen no compute and it doesn't work and then instead of doing that i broke things down i didn't really realize i was doing it but i just did an interview recently with ashley boyer about accessibility and what she said about learning accessibility was great advice not just about learning accessibility but about learning in general of breaking things down and just using what you need for that specific project so and this happened to me when i was working on my personal site not the version that's up now but my previous one where i had icons as links and i didn't realize at the time that you know i didn't even think about it but as i was learning about accessibility i realized those were bad because there was no text so if somebody was using an assistive technology a screen reader or something like that they wouldn't know what those links do or where they go or anything because it's just an image there's no contextual information so then i learned about something there and i learned how to fix it and i implemented that fix for that one thing and now i always remember that that's one thing for accessibility that is just there and i know how to do or maybe more important actually isn't maybe i'll forget how i implemented it and that's the next really important thing is that it's okay if you forget stuff people who call me a css master and stuff like that i forget stuff all the time if you aren't using something every day it's probably something you're gonna forget whatever you do don't see that as a setback a lot of web development isn't knowing how to do everything it's about knowing that something is possible speaking of me forgetting stuff i've watched my own videos because i forgot how something worked and it's something that i made a tutorial on and i still forgot six months later i was trying to do it i knew it was possible i just forgot the syntax or how to implement it properly and then i could go and look that up and find the solution on my own video that i made so this all comes down to stop trying to master things quickly if you're putting the pressure on yourself to learn fast you're going to be too hard on yourself and you're probably going to fail or you're going to take some shortcuts and then pay for those shortcuts down the road and actually make your learning journey a lot longer learn things properly and focus please please focus on the fundamentals it's a bit like when you're setting up a new project it takes longer to set it up properly getting everything in order and just getting all the foundational things for that project in place but then everything goes so much faster than always having to make adjustments on the fly the same really does go for learning you put the time in early on you go slow and intentional you make sure that you're understanding and covering all of the fundamentals and not just covering them but really understanding them and that's gonna supercharge your learning down the road and it's really gonna pay off and you're going to see that your learning just goes faster and faster when you need to learn new things it's so much easier to learn them because you're building on a strong base and if you're looking to learn something new with css and maybe integrate something new into one of your next projects this video right here dives into five fun things that you can add to your next project and with that a huge thank you to my enabler of awesome zack as well as all my other patrons for their monthly support and of course a big thank you to you as well for watching i hope you enjoyed this video and until next time don't forget to make your corn on the internet just a little bit more awesome

Channel: Kevin Powell

Views: 181,871

Rating: 4.9703903 out of 5

Keywords: Kevin Powell, css, html, tutorial, learn front-end development, learn front-end web development, learn front end development from scratch, learn fast, learn quickly, master css, master html, master js, master javascript, javascript, react, sass, vue, angular, front-end

Id: 2v3CWM5FmHs

Length: 10min 47sec (647 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 23 2021