Thought I'd use this space to start keeping track of things I've learned and how I've learned them.
I've had many fits and starts trying to learn enough web development.
It took me a few years of looking for shortcuts before I actually decided to spend time to actually commit and learn one thing at a time.
Early on, I was bouncing around between languages and frameworks. I heard Python was easy to learn, so I'd try a bit of that. Then I heard about Angular and tried that. Figured I could learn Javascript in the process. It was a struggle and I made little progress, especially since I was searching for free tutorials and they were all a bit piecemeal. I thought I was learning, but when I tried, couldn't actually make something from start to finish.
I needed to find a linear path to learn.
I decided to commit a few months and bought a course on Udemy.
It was the Web Developer Bootcamp taught by Colt Steele. It gave a good overview of everything. There was some front-end stuff and backend stuff using Node.js, but I still lacked confidence and understanding.
Ok. At least I knew I was going to focus on Javascript at that point.
Then I found Practical Javascript which was free, and ended up paying for the premium Watch and Code membership. That was a game changer. I felt like I was actually understanding stuff thanks to the instructor Gordon Zhu.
I built a site and deployed it on Heroku. It wasn't pretty, but I made something.
I saw that Colt had just recently made a React Course, so I bought it and got through about 40% of the course before I decided to use what I was learning to update my previous site to use React and Next.js.
Finally got done with it and it mostly works most of the time. The site lets you calculate UPS rates next to USPS and FedEx ones.
There is still a bunch of form validation stuff I can add, and perhaps improve usability, but it so far works for my needs and frankly feels good to have something deployed.
As a side note. If anyone one finds that their Next.js app works in development mode, but once they build it and deploy it, they run into 404 errors, try changing the filenames in the pages into lower case. Took me forever to find this Stackoverflow solution on how to fix Next.js 404 errors in production.
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