DEV Community: Laura Gyre

DIY WordPress Bootcamp, Hooray!

Laura Gyre — Sun, 24 May 2020 19:16:13 +0000

Cross post from the custom-themed Wordpress blog that I finally, finally got set up today, 43 days into my coding journey, about how I got there, where I think I'm going next, and whether you might want to go there, too.

Ever since I heard about coding bootcamps for the first time, the possibility of going through one has been bouncing around in the back of my mind. So this year, when I lost my job during the Coronavirus lockdown, I knew it was time to make some decisions. Some of the decisions I ended up making surprised me a little, though.

First of all, I decided that I do want to give this a shot!

I’m not sure how it will pan out, but I decided that I’ve wondered about that long enough – now it’s time to spend two to three months throwing everything I can at this, and see where I end up.

Second, I decided that although it’s not commonly recommended, I want to specialize in WordPress and the technologies that make it work.

Third, I decided that rather than applying for a bootcamp, I wanted to do this on my own.

Why WordPress?

For me, there are personal reasons to choose WordPress, specifically my employment history: I’ve worked as a graphic designer and content writer, so I’m very familiar with WP from a user’s perspective. In fact, I set up so many websites for myself that I eventually started doing freelance WP setup for others, using customizable themes – so for me, I guess this was kind of a no-brainer.

There are plenty of other reasons, though. Like:

According to Google, 35% of websites are powered by WordPress. That’s a lot of potential work out there!
The culture of WordPress businesses, in general, seems unusually appealing and friendly, especially in comparison to other technology environments. I’ve been looking at lots of job listings and many employers offer diversity initiatives, flexible time-off, remote work, travel and other perks for employee satisfaction and work-life balance.
There are relatively few barriers to entry. While skills are required, less jobs seem to expect years of senior development experience, and a lot of jobs fall all over the technology-expertise spectrum, from relatively non-technical customer support to high-level engineering work. I like to think this means there’s potential for specialization and also advancement.
The actual work of WordPress often seems to involve a lot of design tweaking, as well as some back-end coding. Do you like that? I think I do.
The LAMP stack technology that powers WordPress, including PHP as a back-end language, can do almost anything that other web development stacks can do. While it’s an older and less popular choice outside of the WP community, if you master these tools you can build all kinds of things besides blogs. As you progress you can add other contemporary tools to build on it, like the Laravel framework.
Plus, PHP is supposed to be pretty easy to learn, and there's nothing wrong with that.

Why DIY?

Again, largely practical reasons. While I appreciate that the cost of bootcamps is pretty reasonable for what they are and a lot of them do their best to offer financing options, I was still unable to find one that combined financing I could live with (nothing much upfront) with scheduling I could live with (I have kids and other responsibilities, and might have to look for another job before I finish this training). Plus, very few of them focus on WordPress and/or the LAMP stack. I do feel like I’m missing out somewhat on personal assistance, accountability and networking by learning on my own, but I’m doing my best to fill in those gaps.

For what it’s worth, though, the total cost of this program ranges from about $100 if you buy as little as possible (basically a hosting package–I like GreenGeeks, they’re helpful and eco-friendly–and one or two cheap video courses) to about $700 if you buy everything I mention and a used MacBook Pro, like I did. Also, I’ve been coding an average of about four hours a day, whenever I can get around to it. So, that budget and flexible scheduling helps me to overlook a lot of shortcomings.

On to the Plan!

For any type of web development, you probably want to start with front end basics like HTML, CSS and Javascript. For this, I cannot recommend The Odin Project highly enough. This is a free, open-source web development curriculum. I’ve done most of the front end track, and there’s lots to love about it. My favorite thing, though, is probably the combination of throwing you in the deep end (expecting you to figure out and build real projects from the beginning) with detailed, extensive guidance about the things you might want to learn and practice. It also brings in a lot of things I didn’t know I needed to know, like how to use Git and Github. The projects are hard, but when I finish them I feel so professional!

Speaking of hard, though, please, please read this article about why learning to code is hard and that's ok. Having someone explicitly explain all this to me is the solitary reason I’ve been able to make the progress I have, so far. While you’re at it, figure out how you’re going to get support. The Odin Project Discord server has been key for me at several points, which is one of the things I love about that program. Dev.to and Twitter are also home to unsually supportive and diverse tech communities, and I especially recommend the #100DaysOfCode challenge and Code Newbies on Twitter. Another thing to consider is learning in public. This concept has been pretty inspirational to me, and a big part of why I’ve pushed myself to get this blog up and running and make it to the current post.

After completing most or all of the Odin Project front end, here’s what I would add:

A free trial at Treehouse, or a month or so basic subscription if you need/can swing it. This, by the way, is an affiliate link – but I’m paying for a month and getting through as much as I can; it’s a pretty easy to follow and comprehensive resource. I recommend the introductory PHP track to get some background before diving directly into WordPress.

Then, this Udemy course. It’s a very straightforward, step-by step introduction to theme and plugin development that quickly got me up and running, turning my hand-coded dev portfolio into this simple WordPress site (my first custom theme)! I haven’t done it myself, but if you’re entirely new to WordPress as a user, too, you might want to check out the same teacher’s WordPress for Beginners course. By the way, don’t pay full price for Udemy courses unless it’s an emergency, because they often go on sale for about ten dollars. Full disclosure: I’m currently on day 43 of my 100 days of code, and this is where I’m at in my own learning process.

My future plans, though, include following up with this Udemy course on more advanced WordPress topics, then going back to Treehouse to do the intermediate PHP tracks, an introduction to MySQL databases and the React course (React was only briefly touched on in The Odin Project).

If I decide that I want to build on this LAMP stack foundation in less directly WordPress-related ways, I may do the Treehouse advanced PHP track, and I’m also intrigued by this guy’s books and videos about rounding out your CS background and getting jobs/freelance work without a computer science degree. I’m even a little bit curious about Laravel–but that’s a different post for the future, maybe.

Are you a WordPress student or developer? What would you add to this list? What would you do differently now that you know better?

Where are all the mobile developers?

Laura Gyre — Thu, 31 Oct 2019 04:19:07 +0000

Hi, I'm new, teaching myself Flutter and considering the possibility of some day making money with this. I know that Flutter, specifically, is kind of a weird choice. I thought that I would be hearing more about mobile development in general, though. When I read about career stuff, it seems like it's always front end vs. back end. Are there not a lot of jobs in mobile development? Are they extra hard to get into? Do people talk about them in different places? What should I know about this now?

Thanks for any tips!

Building My Own Bootcamp

Laura Gyre — Wed, 23 Oct 2019 15:58:53 +0000

The first time I heard about coding bootcamps, I was intrigued. I thought about them on and off for a couple of years, but with kids, a job and a tight financial situation, three months felt almost as far out of reach as another college degree. While I'm still thinking about bootcamps somewhere in the back of my mind, I eventually decided that I should give self-directed learning a serious shot first.

I'm not 100% sure I want to work in this field, which has been part of my hesitation to commit. When I decided to take this attempt seriously, though, I decided to move forward as though I fully intend to go pro, in order to keep my options as broad as possible.

In a way, the technical aspect has been the easiest. I chose to focus on Flutter mobile development–another reason to teach myself, since I haven't seen this offered in any programs. Is this dumb, or will it be a way to distinguish myself eventually? More on that in the future, probably. Anyway, while I didn't find any actual bootcamps, I did find three pretty comprehensive "bootcamp" courses for $10 each on Udemy. I'm currently doing two of them at once, using the second as review, and at halfway through both of them this seems to be working pretty well so far.

While I'm confident in my ability to learn independently, I'm a bit more concerned about the networking, career development and soft skills training I might be missing out on. So, I'm trying to start out proactively in that department, too. Here are some things I'm working on in between coding lessons:

Reading Your First Year in Code: A Complete Guide for New and Aspiring Developers.

Listening to Podcasts. I wasn't sure if they would be too technical for my to appreciate, but I'm enjoying Code Newbie and Ladybug so far. Code Newbie also hosts Twitter chats which I'm curious about, but haven't checked out yet.

Starting to build relationships online. I am so happy to have discovered Dev, and also the coding community on Twitter. These are my top two resources so far because they're active, and also there are women there (without getting into this too much, I was honestly pretty amazed and frustrated about how hard this has been to find). I'm particularly following folks who are in the early stages of similar self-taught paths, who work with Flutter, who give support and career advice to newbies, and again, women who may have insight into the particular issues I could face.

Researching app ideas that are relevant to me and my existing community, making a list of future demo projects in the back of my mind.

Learning in Public. I was inspired by this post here, and this podcast episode about building a brand early in your development career.To be fair, I don't think the hosts necessarily meant this early, but I figured that I might as well get started in the way that I hope to continue–and I had already noticed that I was learning some things that would have helped me to know sooner. So, I wrote my first couple of posts, including this one about getting started with Flutter. I've also committed to 100 days of code, partly for structure and partly so that I can tweet about it every day. And, I taught myself a bit about video recording and editing so I can share my apps (tip: Quicktime was the easiest).

The next steps I have in mind are to build a portfolio website or page, and to start submitting to open-source projects on GitHub. I'm not sure how all this will turn out and I'm sure I'm still missing out on some advantages of participating in a real live bootcamp, but I like to think that having a documented history of self-directed education could eventually be its own kind of superpower.

Flutter/Dart App Development for Cheap Beginners

Laura Gyre — Sat, 12 Oct 2019 18:42:16 +0000

This is no expert advice in this post. I'm a beginner, myself, on day 4 of 100 days of code (though since it took me a few days to discover that tag it's really more like day 10). I have dabbled in code, mostly through web design, but nothing too serious. So, what I think I am qualified to do I think is give a pretty good overview of things that make sense to me as a beginner.

If you're a complete beginner, too, you should know that Dart is a programming language, and Flutter is a system that allows us to use Dart to write apps that work on both Android and iOS devices, while adding a lot of other useful function, including a pretty intuitive way of doing responsive design. This is huge for me! I can't speak to what the benefits and concerns about this are on a more technical sense, but I know I was hesitating to learn app development partly because I was having trouble picking an operating system. Also, so far it's quite intuitive and, with my background, I'm pretty into the elements that draw a lot on web design concepts.

I have a list of goals/fears related to developing apps. So far I've conquered three of them:

figuring out the Hardware and Software required to work on this
understanding and learning the basic syntax of Dart
compiling and running apps on actual devices

If you're a complete beginner, too, and would like to know how I got started, these are the tools I recommend most:

Hardware: A Mac is more versatile; there's no way (no easy way at least, I was a little unclear on the details of this) to compile code for iOS from a PC, while a Mac can create apps for both systems. This isn't entirely conclusive, but a pretty good metric for whether your Mac can do all this is whether it can run Mojave. I upgraded to a MacBook Pro from 2012 (the earliest model that theoretically can), and so far it's working, while my 2011 MacBook Air didn't.

Dart Pad lets you experiment with Dart code online, before you deal with installation.

Dart Academy Bootcamp is a fun way to try out some basic concepts and get automatic feedback on how your code is working.

Smartherd's Dart Tutorial is the most complete set of beginner tutorials I've found, with videos and also code to reference. I kind of wish I had started with this, because I prefer to understand the basics before getting thrown into projects that require them. Someone pointed out that this course doesn't cover asynchronous programming/future; here's a short tutorial that does.

Angela Yu's Flutter course on Udemy is a pretty good place to go next, (especially if Udemy is having one of their frequent $10 sales), or a decent place to start if you have programming experience or if you do like being thrown into things. Software instructions seem to get outdated pretty quickly and I had to do some things slightly differently than she described (had to install Xcode before some of the other steps would work, for one thing) but the walkthrough of this process was still incredibly helpful. After that, she jumps into creating actual apps using the Flutter framework.

A couple of relevant things I learned the hard way: in order to run apps on an iPhone or iPad, you'll need to sign up for a free Apple developer account. Also, in Android Studio (the main piece of software) you might want to go into Preferences>Editor>General>Code Completion and turn on "show the documentation popup." This is used a lot in the course, but not fully explained.

There are some other Udemy Flutter courses, too, which focus on slightly different subjects and have equally high ratings. I was kind of disappointed to learn that there's usually very little chance of meaningful feedback despite claims to the contrary, but I guess you can't expect too much for $10.

For further questions, Dart in Action and Flutter in Action seem like great online resources. And, of course, Google. Most of my questions, especially about actual code, have already been answered on Stack Overflow or explained in the documentation.

For 100daysofCode purposes, here's the uncompleted portion of my fears/goals list:

Lambda functions, I still don't understand them
GIT/collaboration
Databases
API stuff (addressed at least somewhat in later parts of the Udemy course)
writing and running tests
Publishing

Over the next 90 days or so, I hope to discover and share more resources as I learn about these subjects.

Dart Tutorials on Exercism

Laura Gyre — Wed, 09 Oct 2019 23:02:42 +0000

I'm teaching myself Flutter, and while the tutorials I'm using (Udemy) explain the actual coding well enough, I've come close to giving up at several points while trying to get programs and other basic tools up and running.

Today I learned about the coding challenges at Exercism, in many languages including Dart (awesome)! I also spent a couple of hours attempting to actually run them on my computer, and was about to give up before I finally figured it out.

In case anybody else is in a similar boat, here's what I learned. FWIW, I have a mac, and this is pretty much all I know about this-not sure how much of this will translate to others.

First of all, though, you need to have Dart installed on your computer in a way that Terminal can access. Having the extensions for Android Studio and/or IntelliJ is not the same thing. If you type "dart" into terminal and it has no idea what you're talking about, this is probably you. In order to install it, you probably also need Homebrew. Type "brew -v" to see if your computer knows anything about this.

Here are the instructions to install Homebrew: https://brew.sh/
Here are the instructions to install a Dart SDK: https://dart.dev/get-dart (What's an SDK? I have no idea–but I still know far more about how to do this than any comprehensive articles I could find, and I do know that my stuff is running now).

Use this tutorial to install actual Exercism: https://exercism.io/cli-walkthrough
Go to the language track you want to try and click on the "Hello World" module. Get the download link from the right column, copy and paste it into terminal. This will download the project to your computer and tell you what directory it's going into.
Open IntelliJ, choose "open" and navigate to the "hello world" folder on your computer. Open the terminal window at the bottom of IntelliJ and type "pub get" to get any additional files (and check for other top of screen notices about importing things). Click on the dart file and complete the challenge.
When you think you have it, type "pub run test" and your work will be checked. If it fails, you get some clues.
When it passes, you can submit your solution by using "cd" to navigate to the folder that contains your file in terminal, then typing "exercism submit [yourfile].dart". There are a few more things to click, but they're pretty self-explanatory.