My Favorite Learning Resources as a Self-Taught Developer
Whether it is day one or day one thousand, learning as a developer is never finished, and finding resources to assist you on your journey of developing applications for the web can be difficult. Even more so, as a self-taught developer, one of the biggest issues you face is You don’t know what you don’t know, this post aims to lay out some resources for you to start or continue on your path to becoming a rock star developer.
Code Wars
Codewars describes itself as,
The place “where developers achieve code mastery through challenges”
On Codewars, software developers train on programming challenges known as kata. These discrete programming exercises train a range of skills in a variety of programming languages and are completed within an online integrated development environment.
What I like about Code Wars is that it allows you to gain “ranks” by completing challenges, authoring challenges, and making comments on other’s submissions. This really makes completing challenges fun and harbors a great sense of community.
Front End Mentor
Frontend Mentor is a really cool community to help grow your front-end skills, it offers a collection of design mockups that you are challenged with building out.
These challenges are separated by degrees of difficulty from “Newbie” to “Guru”. The “Newbie” challenges often involve quick tasks such as creating single responsive components and the “Guru” challenges are much more in-depth, often requiring knowledge of API’s and CRUD operations.
The coolest thing about Frontendmentor.io is when you submit a challenge the app will tell you about accessibility or HTML issues in your code and also gives you a before & after slider to view a comparison of your submission against the design file.
Daily Coding Problem
Daily Coding Problem sends you actual interview questions from top companies like Amazon, Apple, Uber, and Microsoft, right to your email inbox every day.
The free subscription does not include solutions to the questions, but for $9 a month, you get a premium subscription that includes detailed solutions to your daily interview problems. With questions being sent daily, even a month of solutions can be an invaluable asset for the self-taught developer.
Udemy
Udemy is an open online course provider aimed at professional adults and students, with 250,000 courses to choose from, you can learn virtually any new skill, Web Development included. The courses on Udemy are often expensive but if you can be patient, you put the courses that interest you on a wish list and wait for them to go on sale. Courses are often massively discounted, at times up to 97%.
Some courses I found very useful…
- Angular — The Complete Guide (2021 Edition)
by: Maximilian Schwarzmüller
- Angular & NodeJS — The MEAN Stack Guide [2021 Edition]
by: Maximilian Schwarzmüller
- The Web Developer Bootcamp
by: Colt Steele
Team Treehouse
Team Treehouse is one of the leading online learning resources for web development. They have plans starting from $25 per month with a free trial for seven days. A membership gives you access to expert-led video courses and even interactive practice sessions, plus the community is fantastic.
They also offer a Techdegree program to help you launch a new career in as little as 3 months. In addition to learning practical skills, your membership also helps build a job-ready portfolio. Their teaching method includes the use of videos, interactive quizzes, and coding challenges.
