Stay ahead of the curve (for beginner web developers)

#webdev #frontend

Now, it's no secret that tech is always advancing. An author can release a book today, watch 4 years pass, and start to wonder if his work is still relevant. Or maybe he saw it coming and started writing the next edition as soon as the first became a best seller (meh 🤷🏿‍♂️).

Anyways, this article isn't about some proactive fictional JavaScript author, it's about you. Or better yet, you in the future. See, if I just threw a large list of resources on here about tutorials on tech that exist now, that wouldn't help future you now would it? Since future you might find more relevant the new, easier to use/implement, AR API built into your browser that current me and you don't know about yet. So my goal is to help future you have a better chance of finding something you might not have known you wanted.

Keeping up with HTML/CSS

Stackoverflow, Mozilla Developer Network (MDN), W3Schools, these are great resources to get help on a certain feature or solve a problem quicker. They are documentation hubs, they aren't there to preach new tech, but to support you when you find said new tech.

The first thing I'd recommend is to go onto web design award sites like Awwwards.com, CSS Design Awards, FWA Awards, etc. I have found these to be the funnest ways to learn about new design trends and tricks in the web space. Codrops also has some pretty strong blog sections trying out future/current tech which end up influencing or being influenced by works on these award sites.

Another quicker way of knowing about the new HTML/CSS developments is using Can I Use..., a website that details what current features are supported by which browsers. It's a super useful tool for any web developer to have in-general, but in this case what we are looking for is the news section (currently down when I last checked - 12.Jul.2022), here there will be updates whenever a new feature is indexed, but I notice more CSS/HTML stuff on there than anything really, so really nice site to have bookmarked.

Now, on to my personal favourite. Web.Dev has a really good set of tutorials on many topics web related and is my go to for anything new on the web. The authors tend to have very good and technical articles that can be a bit much for the everyday newbie or grizzled veteran. Nothing a little bit of copy pasta won't fix if you ask me. Just give the code a try and tinker till you have some idea of what the feature can and can't do.

I of course can't go on to the next section without mentioning css-tricks. There used to be a time when I'd rush to css-tricks if I needed help on how to implement something in CSS, now for some reason, much like with w3schools as well, I run towards MDN first. I mean MDN's website is great if you are looking for strong technical articles. but css-tricks goes out of it's way to let you know that "Hey, this is a new feature and you might wanna know it. Here's an in-depth article".

JavaScript

Now, apart from the previously mentioned websites, you could also try a slightly "off" way of doing this. See, if you go onto Chrome Status' Features page, you'll find that you can mark certain features as important and even get email notifications for it. Not necessary since you can just check the website periodically or checkout what's been released each new version.

Speaking of releases, Google's What's new in Chrome... series is notorious for also spilling the beans on what features have been made available to us devs in browsers. It also comes with some technical articles to support each feature, so that you are never in the dark. But much like web.dev, it's very technical.

Newsletters...

...you need to join them. Here you get all the info on what's hot, not, and going to be all in one weekend. They only spam you with one email per week usually, some it's every two weeks. At the end of the day you get kept up-to-date in a timely manner.

There's a great list on here that I found, you should definitely read it.

Anything I missed?

Please if there's any other resource you think would be good to keep up with trends in our industry (I'm certain that I missed quite a lot), share them in the comments.

Thanks for reading, peace.