My Journey Learning Web Development
Tags: webdev
Published: 2020-08-06 05:14:05

*This article was originally published on [my personal blog](https://arnaudcortisse.com/blog).*

## Introduction

My name is Arnaud Cortisse and I've been a developer for 5 years. The first 4 years of my professional career were mostly spent using low-level languages. At present, I'm exclusively using web technologies.

In this article, I want to explain my journey getting into web development: Why I got into it, how I went about learning it, the resources I used, etc.

## What got me into web development

In February 2019, I decided to resign from the company I was working for to go work for a startup.

Only about 6 months after I joined, me and half of my coworkers got laid off because they decided to cut costs.

I saw there an opportunity to learn stuff I'd been eager to learn for a long time, that is, web development. Why web development? I'm a huge podcast listener and a big part of what I listen to includes web technologies. Being exposed to those talks over and over made me want to dig more into that topic.

I decided that I would learn it full-time, before taking another job.

## Learning web development

At that time, even though I had been a professional developer for several years, I hadn't done any serious web-related projects. I knew I would basically have to start from the beginning but that I would be able to leverage my previous work experiences and move (way) faster than somebody who has never been exposed to programming before.

### The methodology

From my own experience, I know what works best for me when it comes to learning new stuff is watching video courses while coding along.
Back then, I had already used [Udemy](https://www.udemy.com/) a couple of times and I had enjoyed it, so I decided to stick with it.

What I also do when I feel like one concept is poorly explained in a course is search for other resources and delve deeper on my own (e.g. [Medium](https://medium.com/), [dev.to](https://dev.to/), [Youtube](https://www.youtube.com/), etc.).

### The journey

#### HTML and CSS (2 weeks)

The first thing I set out to do was learning the web foundations, that is, **HTML** and **CSS**. To do so, I took "[Modern HTML & CSS From The Beginning](https://www.udemy.com/course/modern-html-css-from-the-beginning/)". From what I remember, this course was OK.

#### Javascript (2 weeks)

Once I was done with it, I immediately started learning about **JavaScript**. Once again, I had to choose a resource that would guide me and decided to go with "[Modern JavaScript From The Beginning](https://www.udemy.com/course/modern-javascript-from-the-beginning/learn/lecture/8762504#overview)". I don't recommend this one because the instructor makes plenty of mistakes and I remember feeling quite frustrated at some point (which is why I only went through 60% of it). Still, I had gained some insights into JavaScript, especially in a browser context and I felt like it was enough for now.

#### General knowledge (4 weeks)

Now that I had the basics of web development, I wanted to expand my **general knowledge** of the web world. It just so happens that "[The Complete Web Developer in 2020](https://www.udemy.com/course/the-complete-web-developer-zero-to-mastery/)" is designed to give you an overview of web development. Granted, this course contains some stuff I already knew about, but repetition is good!

After I finished this course, that wasn't enough. I still wanted to have more insights into web development.
I bought yet another course: [The Complete Junior to Senior Web Developer Roadmap](https://www.udemy.com/course/the-complete-junior-to-senior-web-developer-roadmap/). It is kind of the follow-up of the previous one.

Overall these two courses were, in my opinion, really great.

#### Front-end framework (4 weeks)

OK... I had the basics covered and knew a bit more as to what it takes to create a full-fledged web application.
But I didn't feel like I was ready to create my own application just yet. I had dabbled in React and Redux in the previous course, but it was clearly not enough to get started and create a project on my own (besides, I didn't know what to develop).

I decided to take one last course exclusively focusing on the React ecosystem: [Complete React Developer in 2020](https://www.udemy.com/course/complete-react-developer-zero-to-mastery/).

Why React?

- I had already been in touch with it in one of the previous courses I took and I had enjoyed it.
- I did some research and it appeared to be one of the most (if not the most) popular front-end frameworks.
- I would be able to use it for a lot of stuff: web applications, static websites, server-side rendered websites, mobile applications, desktop applications, etc.

This last course gave me a good grounding in React. In hindsight, I do not regret having chosen the React framework.

## Creating my own project

At that point, I was already 3 months into my learning journey. I remember thinking to myself "now, you ought to create something on your own and get out of this tutorial hell". I'd learned enough that I felt like I could create my own project to consolidate all my newly-acquired knowledge. I wanted to create something from scratch.

And then, I got an idea. In the [next blog post](https://dev.to/arnaudcortisse/my-journey-creating-my-first-solo-project-part-1-23ik), I'll give the big picture of my journey developing [DoNotSkip](https://donotskip.com/en/), the project I chose to develop.