How I Made My Life Easier When Learning HTML & CSS

At the beginning of this year, I made a decision to change careers to become a Software Developer since then I was struggling to find the best way to learn HTML & CSS in an effective way so in July I started at Microverse — a global school for remote software developer — and I’m going to share some things that made my life easier in order to master HTML & CSS skills.

Where to start?

There is a lot of free content where you can start to learn HTML & CSS and the hardest thing about this is to find which of them suits you best. First, you should ask yourself what is your way of learning new things?

Is it reading?Is it watching some videos and following tutorials?Building stuff and searching along the way work for me?

With that in mind, you can filter the contents and make a better decision when starting your journey.

The beginning of my journey

The way that works best for me is starting to follow interactive tutorials when I have zero experience on the subject before doing any project. I’m going to list here the best tools I found in in the past few months:

 Codecademy

FreeCodeCamp

Solo Learn

After doing Learn HTML and Learn CSS in Codecademy, all the challenges present in Responsive Web Design Certification (FreeCodeCamp) and HTML Fundamentals and CSS Fundamentals in Solo Learn I felt I was ready to start to build some projects.

When I actually start to build projects

I decided at first to build the projects in FreeCodeCamp, build it and passed all the tests using mainly HTML because they have an instruction about CSS that only says:

 Give it your own personal style. 

Well, I wasn’t able to design anything and I finished these projects with a really ugly layout and kind of desperate on how I was supposed to learn CSS that way. So here’s my first tip: don’t try to make the FreeCodeCamp projects in Web Design if you’re not a creative person and have some background in Design (which I think most people trying to learn how to code doesn’t have).

Codecademy is not a good place to test your knowledge on building things as well because it works as some guided tutorial and you’ll do almost nothing by yourself.

Clone famous websites

At this point, I found out about TheOdinProject. Is a free website that guides you in order to teach you everything you need to know to become a web developer, such as HTML, CSS, GitHub, Ruby on Rails, JavaScript and so on. I saw their course about HTML & CSS and it’s all about to clone some famous websites such as:

New York Times

The Next Web

NewsWeek

They cover Responsive Design, Bootstrap, Sass in eight clone projects and when you’re done with it you’ll feel really comfortable with all the stuff you just learned. 

Pair programming & Microverse

This is a lot of content to study, apply and master and do this alone could be really difficult. Microverse methodology includes pair programming 8 hours per day, mentorship, get with your team (usually 5 persons) to discuss anything technical and issues and a huge support team that is committed to help you and guide you through your whole journey there.

One of the first phrases in the website is:

No matter where you are in the world, Microverse trains you to become a remote software developer and connects you with life-changing professional opportunities. The best part? You don’t pay anything until you get a job!

You need to commit for 6–9 months but you don’t have deadlines so whenever you have already some experience or are just beginning you’ll be able to learn at your own pace. And yeah, you won’t pay anything until you get a job, and a nice one!

Microverse’s routine is amazing and I learned a lot every single day. Not only the technical skills that I was looking for but also how to be more collaborative with coworkers, how to solve conflicts with people, how to be a better communicator are just a few examples of a number of things you learn when you spend most of your day working with people from all around the world.

You can check it out more on their website and see if it’s a good fit for you as it was for me and currently for students from 70 different countries.