Month: March 2018

Web Developer Roadmap

I’ve been saying for years, that there is no such thing as a “full stack developer”, no matter how many CVs your HR department processes per day, matching the title.  Web Developer Roadmap is a cool little GitHub repository, which maps the road for becoming a web developer in 2018.

It shows technologies that you need to get familiar with, depending on what kind of a web developer you want to become – front-end, back-end, or DevOps – and how to organize your learning and move from one technology to another.

The reason the “full stack developer” isn’t there, is, I’m sure, because that just combines all of the other ones.  And each one of them is way more than can fit into a single human head.  So the combination would probably make it explode.

Even if you are already an experienced web developer, this roadmap is a handy thing to keep around, as it gets updated as things change.  And in web development things do change, and they do so frequently.

SQLBolt – Learn SQL with simple, interactive exercises

SQLBolt is by far the best SQL tutorial that I’ve ever seen!  Yes, I know, it’s a very bold statement.  But I promise that it’s true.

With hundreds of books, videos, and other tutorials around, the problem of delivering the understanding of data management, databases, and SQL to regular people still hasn’t been sold.  But SQLBolt provides a giant leap forward in this area.

The tutorial starts from the very basics and gets progressively more and more advanced.  But this progression is divided into small, very focused chapters.  Each chapter provides a brief description of the concept, an example query for the concept, and a set of exercises.  The exercises are all interactive, so that you don’t have to install a database or get access to a real one, and you don’t have to trust yourself on correctly solving the tasks.  The interactive exercises system marks the problem as solved the moment you type in the correct query.

If you get stuck at any point with any particular exercises, just click on the Solution link nearby, and the tutorial will show you the correct answer.  I found this to be a perfect balance between forcing the reader to try things out, but without the annoying delays for those of us who like to skip ahead.

There is really no reason now for anybody at all to learn SQL.  SQLBolt is brilliant!

A Comprehensive Guide To Web Design

“A Comprehensive Guide To Web Design” is a rather lengthy article that focuses on the non-technical bits of the web design.  It’s not about the tools and technologies, but more about the meaning and good practices.  The article covers the design of navigation, content, call to action, web forms, accessibility, and other important bits which are frequently forgotten.