How to Become a Better Web Developer - My Thoughts

hi everyone welcome to this video in this video I want to answer to something which I see in the comments quite a lot I often get asked how can I become a better developer what should I build do you have any demo projects I can build well as it turns out right now I don't but in this video I want to give you a good guideline on how you can grow as a developer I'll not just mention some demo projects you could build but I want to give you the three key things I think are very important to become a better developer and to keep on growing because that never stops obviously every developer always has to improve has to become better has to learn new trends and all that stuff so in this video I can hopefully help you understand how you can become a better developer and how you can keep up with the latest trends so how do you grow as a developer and grow really is a broad term here of course while growing for one means that you have to practice you have to become better you have to fall into certain traps you have to solve certain problems so that you know how to solve them the next time you encounter them or sometimes you'll even fall into the same trap again the next time but at some point of time you know how that specific feature you need in your next application how that can be implemented in a working way so practicing as always in life is key and that never stops I obviously also practice a lot every new course I create is a practice every project I create is a practice and that is indeed something which you always have to keep on doing because the industry also doesn't stop it also keeps evolving the next building block besides practicing and learning certain patterns and how to code therefore is that you have to challenge existing best practices and solutions best practices obviously exist for a good reason and if we're using them generally it's not a bad idea but you will see how best practices emerge in this video we'll talk about how they emerge and why it still might be worth questioning them doesn't mean that all best practices are bad but you should always be open-minded and come up with your own patterns and solutions and then validate them against best practices so I'll also talk about this in this video and now the last building block into which I'll dive in this video is the one which also helps you stay up to date you have to discuss and contribute so you have to dive into the community and that does not mean that you have to write like 10 posts on YouTube or Facebook or anywhere on a daily basis it just means that you should be in the community that you should read about new trends that you should discuss with our people help other people so we'll talk about this in this video to you now let me start with the practice part what exactly does practicing mean practicing for me mainly means that you should build dummy projects or part of projects like an authentication flow or a dummy rest api or a dummy file upload so basically what I also try to do here on this channel that is something what you should do in your own set your own goals your own challenges and build stuff this is how you learn the most now there are roughly two kinds of applications you could build or that is what I recommend if people ask me if I have ideas what they should build well their ideas are already out there build simplified versions of popular websites or apps and that does not just mean the big ones like Amazon if you find a website which is interesting to you where a certain feature is interesting to you well then try to duplicate it you can even dive into the source code of this page if you need some inspiration it's probably minified but you can't unmodified to a certain extent and that could be a good starting point or you try it from scratch so simply pick certain websites you like or the big common names everyone knows like Facebook and so on and start rebuilding very simplified clones of them if you're cloning Facebook obviously you don't want to clone the entire social network it is what it is because it exists since 2004 you'll probably not clone that in one week but you can clone a friend feature a like feature a messaging feature the group's feature you can clone simplified versions of these features now the alternative is that you simply build these evergreen apps everyone knows you can build a blog you can build a shop or the good old to-do list app I know that everyone hates the to-do list app and I don't use it in my tutorials because everyone hates it but it exists for a good reason because it has all four kirat operations in it and therefore it often would be a good starting point to practice working with that new database or with that new framework because you're forced to do all these common operations creating reading updating deleting and do that in a relatively simple interface where you don't have to worry about too many other aspects of the app so also feel free to bulleted you app if you feel like it so these are the kinds of apps you could build and app really is a loose term here I mean also features of that app so if you're interested in building a shopping cart well then don't focus on the checkout don't care about how administrators area could look like simply add some dummy data into your app and focus on the feature you are interested in now with both approaches you will have a certain goal you have certain features you want to implement you want to get done you want to have in a working State and you should focus on these features and leave out the unimportant rest as I just mentioned and if you do that well then you'll face challenges you'll face problems something doesn't work as you expected or it did wear it at first but then you detect some logical issue well don't give up this is the point where you will start learning this is the point where you need to Google and you'll find blog posts on how another person solved that authentication process you'll find Stack Overflow discussions you'll find YouTube tutorials you might find paid courses to help you so you will then find resources that help you with that problem or if those problems you're facing so that is the part where you then have to pull through and not give up and also not ask anyone else to solve it for you but really dig into the problem and solve it yourself this can include asking for some support or asking some question on Stack Overflow but it does not mean that you should say I want this how do I do that yeah you'll not learn anything you can also just go to an agency and tell them they should pull your website in that case you'll not become a better developer by that so this is the practice part this is what I understand under this term obviously as always please dive into the comments and dive into the discussion or let me hear your thoughts about this how do you practice what is your approach to that now practicing is great but practicing also includes that you will implement solutions following certain patterns or best practices and you should always challenge these existing solutions obviously they do exist for a good reason and most of them are a lot of them might be great or maybe all of the best practices currently are great and the best practice for a good reason but how do you best practices emerge while they do emerge because people try to solve a problem and chances are that this problem has already been solved before but maybe not in a way that suffices for your exact use case maybe not in a way that you can implement or that you want to implement or maybe you just want to explore other alternatives so that is how best practice is emerge you question existing solutions you really will have the case that no solution exists for a problem that might be the case - but often you have some kinds of patterns but then you can question them and either you find a solution that works better than the existing solution or you have one that is worse the better case a new best practice might emerge and of course that always instant validated because you might share your solution on blog posts and if it is really good and solves a common problem other people might pick it up and that is how such a practice might emerge well and if it's worse than existing solutions a it might still work for you and if it doesn't like introduce a clearing problem like a security issue memory leaks so if it works for you well you might also stick to it but you can of course then also go back to the existing solutions if that is fine for you the idea here really is that you should always challenge what you're being taught and obviously this includes my tutorials too in all these videos and courses I do teach best practices I do teach common patterns but this does not mean that you should never ask wherever you can do it differently or better because often they're also simply is more than one solution it's not like that for every problem you might be facing there's exactly one right path this is not the case so definitely have a look at left to right and find out different ways of solving something now last but not least discussing and contributing and this really is a core part of becoming a better web developer we can split this into two parts and let's start with this casting what does this casting even mean well this casting means that you dive into typical community forums like Stack Overflow cora youtube comments or also twitter you can follow opinion leaders there you can follow other developers and they will retweet tweets of our developers which you then also can follow and this allows you to stay up to date with trends because if you browse around if you google for certain solutions or problems you will find patterns you might find new patterns you might find new trends someone is mentioning that beauty is is a really cool framework coming up and that is solving that problem you're having and react in a better way at least in the opinion of that person so diving into the community and if it's just read only will already get you very far and indeed if you search for certain problems or errors you might be encountering you will often end up on Stack Overflow as we all know and that is pretty common pretty normal and a pretty good reason of why Stack Overflow exists and why it is so popular even if you're just reading you will find a lot there now of course you can also talk you can share your opinion you can dive into discussions you can share your opinion in the YouTube comments you can share your opinion on Twitter you can tweet your own solutions your own questions too so you can also contribute actively that is probably better than just reading though I will say just by reading your all the forced to save your problems on your own because asking always is easy if you read only and then you take that knowledge you play around until a problem is solved that will get you very far but of course it's also not always about solving problems so sharing your opinion on new solutions on you frameworks on new languages on hybrid apps versus native apps all that is very valuable and makes the community what it is just make sure that you also question but accept our opinions too often the internet and we all know that we have a toxic discussion culture and if you can't discuss without telling our people how damp they are or that their opinions absolute or that they should become whatever because they are certainly too dumb to be a programmer well then you are the one who's too dumb it's as simple as that if you have to discuss or that's not even discussing if you have to talk to our people like this if you have to put our people down to feel better yourself well then everyone's better off if you just leave and I'll be that honest now thankfully we have a very friendly discussion culture in the YouTube comments of this channel and also an udemy and everywhere I can't complain but you often you read it and once in a time there is such a comment on this channel too or somewhere else or I see that our student talks to another student in a very rude way and I don't like that and nobody likes that and nobody learns from that you're not doing anything good if you're talking like this now chances are you're not doing that but also if you see someone else joining a discussion like that well feel free to also tell them which benefit they're adding which is none so discussing awesome but in a friendly way respecting others obviously last but not least also discuss problems and solutions and share links so contribute to your community by sharing solutions you came up with or great blog articles you found with our people great tutorials you found share them share them around because everyone benefits if we all find good solutions good discussions faster so that's the discussion part and fittingly I talked a lot about it I guess so what do you mean with contributing contributing is all about sharing and we have to sum the discussion part a bit too but here I mean more well focused on the code so you can for example contribute to open source projects on github and that is an awesome way of building a portfolio too by the way you can also contribute in the udemy Q&A section of courses you are enrolled or in the youtube comments or you can create your own tutorials or write your own blog articles this obviously is the part where you are a bit more exposed and therefore this is something a lot of people refrain from I can only encourage you to do that contribute to other people's projects share your knowledge you once in a while you'll find people who don't like it and that is fine you might even be able to learn something from the negative feedback you're getting but you'll also get a lot of positive feedback and you will learn a lot for yourself you help our people and with the open-source contribution as well as tutorials you also build a portfolio which you can show to possible employees so that's not to underestimate as well contributing all the means that you help ours did you share your code that you work on open-source projects well basically what I said already I guess and that you should learn from mistakes you make so don't be afraid to make mistakes don't be afraid to share your code and others might find an error in it or tell you that you're not following a certain practice well you would have known otherwise right so only because our people told you you learn something that helps you improve your code for the future it isn't that what you're trying to do so even if it's not the most pleasant feeling at first to be corrected or to be challenged it is the point where you will learn a lot and where you can grow a lot therefore the last but not least also consider donating to certain open source initiatives like for example view chess you can become a patreon for that you can also become a patreon for many YouTube channels not for this one right now but you can support us and me by buying my udemy courses you basically donate some money and you even get a course in return and our projects our channels might not have that model but they allow you to become a patreon and support them monetarily through that and that is worth considering if you got some extra bucks to spare consider that because you're taking advantage of the resources they're providing it's also fair to give back some of that share so these are my thoughts on growing as a developer and I hope that these thoughts are helpful to you I hope this maybe gives you something to think about or some new aspects maybe you already knew all of that and I now wasted like 15 minutes of your time or something like that I'm very sorry about that but please join this cushon so exactly what I talked about in this video and let me hear your thoughts about this video and your thoughts about all these topics and what else you know what people should do or what might be helpful so hopefully see you in future videos bye

Channel: Academind

Views: 99,419

Rating: 4.9639964 out of 5

Keywords: web developer, web development, learning web development, learning to code, web developer secrets

Id: H7X25hZ1Pq8

Length: 16min 28sec (988 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 19 2018