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Catherine Chen
Catherine Chen

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Free customized learning pathways for your journey as a web developer (idea)

Yesterday evening I came up with this idea: to collect free online web development learning resources and organize them into learning pathways.

There’s so much content out there, but it’s difficult to find good materials that match your skill level, or tools that enable you to create what you want. (Of course, documentation is always there, but we don’t always feel like reading it - right??)

I’m thinking of building a website containing these organized learning pathways. All that would need to be done is content organization/curation. No new material would need to be written.

On the site, users could choose to start with either:

  1. A pathway. Say someone wants to learn frontend, or discover more about Kubernetes, or maybe even just dip their toes into headless CMS solutions.
    • Examples: “Frontend Web Development”, “Laravel”, “ReactJS”, “Exploring Cloud Services”, “Exploring Headless CMS Options”, etc.
    • For Frontend Web Development, for example, users could first learn the basics of HTML & CSS, then responsive web design, followed by JavaScript. Resources could be from sites such as FreeCodeCamp, Udacity (their short courses are free), and Codecademy. Afterwards, users could explore responsive design libraries (Bootstrap, TailwindCSS, Tachyons), JavaScript animation, jQuery, and AJAX.
  2. A project goal. I learned web development by trying to create projects. I’d explore a bunch of tools and libraries I felt could help me create the result I wanted, then pick and choose the ones I liked. I learned literally all of my current web dev skills through this process.
    • Example: “Create a Personal Portfolio”, “Create an eCommerce Site”, etc.

What do you guys think? Are there any similar projects going on? Is this something useful you would use (or would’ve used if it existed when you needed it)? What paths/project goal choices would you like to see? I’d love to hear your thoughts on this.

Top comments (1)

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Laura Gyre

Have you seen the Odin Project? It's open source/free, project based, and really good IME (I may be biased, though, because I'm currently using it to learn development). Pathways are currently limited, including front end only and full stack with either ruby/rails or node, but pretty comprehensive as far as I can tell.