Github Copilot trial ends, now what?

André Duarte — Sat, 20 Aug 2022 17:50:00 +0000

If you’re a student or a maintainer for popular open source projects, GitHub Copilot remains free. Otherwise, pay for it!

What are you planning to do?

Are you considering paying for this tool?

Does your company support you on this feature?

Do you think it worths the price?

duar.ch

All I can learn in a month...

André Duarte — Fri, 24 Jul 2020 01:47:14 +0000

Help me to plan a 30 days of intense learning experience in front end skills

I'll be on staycation next month, and I'm planning study as much as possible this month. I'm 40 years old, and I decided to move on my career to development.

I currently work in a bank, I have some knowledge of HTML, CSS and (superficial) Javascript. I just fished my Responsive Web Design Certification on freeCodeCamp.

I confess I'm a bit lost, just realized how much I have to learn. I can't waste this precious time. So I want to be well prepared to study the entire month focused on what is worthy.

So please give me some tips, in what should I focused, how can I concetrate on a quick improvement of my skills!!!

Tips

Tom Valorsa

Jul 24

OK, well first up I think you will get much more out of your month of study if you narrow the scope of what you look at. Things like Docker/PWA/YAML are all interesting but not essential for frontend, so I’d focus on the fundamentals (HTML/CSS/JS) and maybe look at one framework. Some ideas:

HTML/CSS

Pick some simple layouts from sites that you like and try to build them with plain HTML and CSS
- Look for more complex examples as you get more confident and try to build those too
- You could even design some layouts yourself and try to build them
- This will help you get a feel for the building blocks you can use when building UI, which will apply to any framework you use in future
Get a good understanding of the position and display properties in CSS
Experiment with the different ways you can select elements (and others around them) with CSS selectors
Read up on semantic HTML so you can get a feel for the tags you can use and when they make sense

Find a decent overall JS tutorial in one place and work through it from start to finish
- I used codecademy years ago but not sure what else is available now
Maybe work through some puzzles/problems on sites like codewars, and look at other people’s solutions, to get a better feel for how you can solve problems in different ways

Framework

Pick a framework/library to experiment with to see how people build larger apps (i.e. React/Angular/Vue).
I’m biased but I’d suggest React, as it’s very easy to get going with and you only need to master a few concepts to be productive with it. This will help you to understand the benefits that a framework can provide you.
Angular is good too but in my experience the learning curve is a bit steeper and that might not fit with your timeframe. I’ve dabbled with Vue as well but can’t really speak to that, so will let someone else chime in.

MDN is your new best friend 🎉 If you want to understand more about a CSS property, or a JS function etc just Google "MDN blah" and you should be able to find detailed info.

Good luck!

DEV Community: André Duarte