Laravel is a web application framework that many developers say is a dream to work with. That’s because it aims to take the tedium out of routine web project tasks like authentication, routing, sessions, and caching, making the development process simple and straightforward without sacrificing application functionality. If you’re not familiar with the Laravel framework,…
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I’ve done a bunch of mentoring and I always end up telling my own story to explain that learning to code isn’t just learning the technical aspect, it’s also learning to cope with feelings
When it comes to coding which is a skill, much more akin to playing a musical instrument.
You can’t just read about playing a musical instrument to get good. You can’t just immediately start playing well. You have to put the time in.
Same with coding. You’ll suck at first: You won’t understand what you are doing. You will break stuff and have no idea why. Things will work and you will have no idea why. You will be frustrated a lot of the time.
The spinning of the wheels is learning. Every mistake you make is learning. You are learning what not to do, and you are learning how things work (even though it doesn’t feel like you are).
You won’t notice your growth because as you get better at something, you will be challenged by new things and you’ll forget that that thing that tripped you up for a long time just ‘comes naturally’.
Having people tutor you or solve things for you or hold your hand isn’t learning. It’s not going to help you build the skill set. Watching someone else play a musical instrument will not get you very far (especially as a beginner), it helps a little, but it still won’t make you better, you’ll only get better when you work on it on your own.
It can feel really lonely, hard, impossible… and when you start out you have so much to learn, you can’t code until you learn about a text editor, and how to open things in a browser… there are a million basic lessons you are learning on top of just coding at first. It’s like when you open a dictionary to loop up a word and the definition is another word you don’t know… over and over again.
The only thing to do is stick with it. There is no softer landing, there is no easier way.
This is a cold harsh reality. The upside is, over time you learn to cope with your feelings and this frustration stops bothering you so much. You just shrug your shoulders and keep going or you learn to take a break and not fret too much.
But you’ll also learn you’re far stronger than you realized. Tougher, gritty, and you will feel a certain level of pride with your work that you’ve never felt from completing a worksheet in school.
Our tools for vertical alignment have gotten a lot better as of late. My early days as a website designer involved laying out 960px wide homepage designs and aligning things horizontally across a page using a 12-column grid. Media queries came along which required a serious mental shift. It solved some big problems, of course,…
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In order to stay relevant, many businesses have to reinvent themselves when the time comes. In recent years, we saw even some of the biggest brands making the tough decision to rebrand their identities completely. Some were successful at rebranding while many failed miserably. Needless to say, it’s a risk you take when changing the…
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Do you want to build and deploy fast, beautiful social media or communication apps for both Android and iOS? Then you should consider creating a Flutter app. Using Flutter, you can write apps for both Android and iOS using a single codebase. And a Flutter app template makes it easy to get started. What Is…
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Google Analytics is one of the most popular marketing analytics platforms out there — and not just because its standard version is free. More than a million organizations worldwide use this platform to gain better insights on user behavior on their websites. However, for most web developers, their involvement with Google Analytics ends with just…
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In theory, the web knows no borders. This means that, inevitably, some visitors will speak a language that is different from your website. Depending on the demand, it may make sense to provide your content in multiple languages. You may even think of having a multilingual site as an extension of accessibility. There are several…
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If you have been waiting to experiment with Sketch, there’s never a better time to dive in than right now. The Mac-based vector graphics editing tool for user interface and experience design has become a go-to tool for many designers and developers. If you haven’t started using it yet, or already downloaded the software and…
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React Native is one of the most widely used frameworks for building mobile applications. This tutorial is targeted at developers who want to get started testing React Native applications that they build. We’ll make use of the Jest testing framework and Enzyme. In this article, we’ll learn the core principles of testing, explore various libraries…
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Jeff Starr is not the first person to serendipitously find his way into the WordPress community. After all, many of us have discovered and since fallen in love with the CMS. But he has become one of its most prolific and recognizable members. The author of four books, along with dozens of both free and…
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