Build It and They Will Pay You: A Guide to becoming a Web Developer in Atlanta

Learning the ABC's of coding. Always Be Coding.

It's late and you have nothing to do. Netflix seems to be an impossible hot mess full of obscure and dull movie choices with little obscure senseless items that tell you percent match. What is that supposed to mean anyways? And how come you never were able to finish college and found yourself in this dead end job. I mean your smart, and people seem to know your clever. You just can't find the trust fund and connections to send yourself to Harvard Yard. I mean, only people who earn MBA's from elite schools make millions and own the most interesting companies. Right? I mean except Bill Gates who never graduated or maybe Mark Zuckerburg or Steve Jobs and on, and on, and well you get the picture.

Listen no one ever did anything with their lives by sitting around complaining about the myriad of obstacles that keep them from their dreams. So why would you? The biggest wealth creation tool is sitting right in front of you, the internet. Try to image all of the people who have become millionaires by creating products for the internet. Well maybe don't, because its a long list. I know, not everyone should embark on the long journey of becoming an internet bizillionaire but I'm not talking to everyone. I'm talking to the people who are hard headed, love logic puzzles, and have a dream of owning their own company some day. If this is you, I have a road map for you.

How would I know the path to success through the internet? I went from a complete zero of the internet to successful startup in five years. And you can too. Really. I'll show you the roadmap to becoming a Front End Developer.

First step is obvious, you need a computer. I suggest a Apple Macbook. Why? You are going to become a Front End Developer and a Macbook will make your life easier. Yes you can use a PC for now but eventually you will want to switch to Macbook. Why Front End developer? Well, lets face it all of the Computer Science degrees around the world churn out the finest back end developers, i.e. think super nerds. So who churns out the Front End developers? No one, they make themselves. That's why if you ever are lucky enough to make it to a dev shop you'll notice the Front End developers are a motley crew. This could be you!

Well enough chatter, lets get your computer set up for coding.

Go to Atom IDE (IDE: Integrated Development Environment) and download the latest for your computer. An IDE is just an application where your write your code. It has a lot of cool stuff to make your life easier. Mostly you will never know the extent of the functionality for the first 2-3 years of use. Learn the basics, the rest will come in time.

Remember this statement "Coding is like peeling an Onion." Yes there will be tears. Yes you will feel completely inadequate but if you continue to do the hard work one day you will realize, you made it. So be prepared for hardship, it will come. Download the IDE.

After that you will need to pick a stack (stack: developer speak for the technologies you will use to build a web application) and stick to it unless there is a good reason to switch. I suggest learning Angular. It is one of the two most popular Front End Frameworks and it has a bunch of documentation. Documentation is good because it is free education on technology. It is going to take a lot of reading and hearing acronyms to make the connections.

The Angular framework for mobile and desktop. 

The next 6 months of your life will be filled with questions, lots of questions. You will want to answer these questions by going to StackOverflow. This is the website where 80 percent of your web related questions will be answered. Look for the green check mark which indicates that it is the accepted answer.

The process usually looks like this, you have a question or get stuck (this will happen often). Go to Google and type in the question and look for StackOverflow in the results. While we are at it, you will need to learn how to search on Google. This will be one of the most important tools you will use.

To learn the basics of the internet go to MDN (Mozilla Developer Network). Mozilla is like the benevolent overseers of the internet and have excellent examples and documentation on all things web.

Now that you have an IDE and have downloaded Angular lets talk a little about what is going on in the application. A website is made of three things HTML, CSS, and Javascript. Now, no one enjoys obscure meanings and acronyms like a developer so we as a community couldn't leave websites alone to just consist of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. So over the past 20 years the internet went from a bunch of boring word documents to what we call rich experience through a myriad of confusing evolutionary processes. But remember it all comes back to HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.

Next Post I'll talk more about how to get Angular setup and running on your computer. Cheers.