Power Up Your Coding Skills

Being a front-end developer, it’s so important to keep on top of the ever-changing web. Sometimes books get outdated fast and you need to find alternatives. The good thing is that you can find resources in a plethora of forms thanks to the open contribution of the web community. I’d like to share the resources/methods that I’ve come across over the years for building up my coding knowledge.

Listen to podcasts

This is great if you have a long commute or you are winding down for the day. For everything front-end related, Shoptalk Show should be your go-to. Unfinished Business and BizCraft are also really great if you run a web dev business or are a freelancer.

Get a subscription to a professional learning site

If you’ve got the money and the time, Code School and Treehouse are a couple of really great resources for learning. You watch a video and then do a series of hands-on quizzes or code exercises to utilise the knowledge you’ve just gained.

Subscribe to RSS feeds

Use a feed reader (I used a combination of Feedly and Newsify) to subscribe to blogs and get all their articles in one place. Great for commutes as you can read everything offline.

Subscribe to email newsletters

In recent times, email newsletters have been my go-to option for keeping up to date as most of them arrive in the inbox nicely curated with the good stuff so you don’t have to spend your time weeding through everything.

General topics:

Web Design Weekly Web Development Reading List Fresh Brewed Frontend Smashing Newsletter The Modern Web Observer Hacker Newsletter

Specific topics:

Responsive Design Weekly Web Tools Weekly JavaScript Weekly HTML5 Weekly CSS Weekly wpMail

Read it on Reddit

Part link sharing and part forum. I highly recommend checking out /r/webdev on a daily basis. There you’ll also find more specific subreddits such as /r/javascript and /r/web_design.

View source

The great thing about the web is that if you’re ever left wondering “HOW DID THEY DO THAT?”, you can easily take a peek under the hood. It’s a great way to find new jQuery plugins, check out other naming conventions or just to see how other people mark up their HTML.

Just build websites

A constant mantra of the Shoptalk Show, but it could not be any truer. It’s great reading books and blogs, but you really need to put your knowledge into practice in order to really grok concepts. Pro tip: grab a PSD resource from somewhere like Premium Pixels or Pixeden and just build it. It’s a lot different to designing your own interface and building it as you’re not setting up your own challenges.

And if you ever get stuck, Google and StackOverflow are your friends.