Just Build It

The What

What I cannot create, I do not understand – Richard Feynman

I do not understand web technologies, so I am trying to build a website. No frameworks, no templates, only tools I build myself. We’re doing this raw, as our ancestors did. Within reason of course. This website is a continuous project for my self-learning HTML, CSS, Javascript and, to a small extent, the way the internet works.

The Why

I’ve always been curious about web technologies, but a combination of lack of time and some osmotically acquired prejudice (my excuse) against web development has prevented me from learning it. For some reason, I was persuaded by the notion that web development technologies such as HTML, CSS and (especially) Javascript, were some ‘lesser’ form of software development. Now, I still have a lack of time, but my curiosity has overcome this unfounded bias. So self-learning web development has become a procrastination effort. As I’m procrastinating doing something more useful, I do something less useful. Besides, given how much I interact with websites, I should at least understand the basics of how they work.

The How

There are countless online resources for learning. So much so, that it is a non-trivial amount of work to find the correct, let alone best, resource. Standards and tech fashions change very quickly, and finding up-to-date information can be tricky. This is doubly so for a standard like HTML and CSS, which on top of many new features, has varying levels of support from different browsers. This was interesting to me – that these standards evolve in such a decentralised and browser-lead fashion, rather than through the decisions of a centralised technical committee. I may be wrong about this, but that’s how it seems anyway.

I don’t have much of a structure to how I’m going about learning these things. It seemed too much effort to find a reputable curriculum, so my approach is to find things that look cool and copy them. To this end, YouTube channels like Kevin’s and sites like Codepen are fantastic. It’s the ‘copy-without-paste’ method. I used to do something like this, but for generic text, when I wanted to learn touch typing. And there is something to be said about the muscle-familiarity of typing a new language. Those semicolons and curly braces are a workout.

The End

Building websites is fun – Richard Feynman

It will be fun to see where this goes.