status
published
dsq_thread_id
Yesterday I wrote about teaching my brother to code. Today I thought I'd elucidate the strategy I'm using to teach him.
A site a day
The idea is simple: every day my brother will code up a new site and do a quick writeup about the experience. This structure is meant to really make him get his hands dirty and make some sites—to cause him all sorts of frustration with CSS positioning, JavaScript scope and all the other pitfalls of front-end development. Essentially to help my brother speed through the most daunting, "weed-out" phases of learning to code.
This structure was also partially inspired by Jennifer Dewalt and her amazing 6-month journey to becoming a developer, where she created a new site every day for 180 days. Our goal is more incremental, and will initially only span the month of December.
Mutually Beneficial
It should probably go without saying that this course structure is not only beneficial to my brother but also to me as well. It is my opinion that you never truly know a subject until you can teach it to others. Teaching him code is going to help solidify in my mind what I really know and what I myself could still use work on.
But wait, there's more!
Even better, since I want my brother practicing code and not worrying about anything else, I'm going to be designing a new site every day for him to code. This is really exciting since it's the perfect combination of pressure and motivation that I need get off my ass and hone my design skills.
I'm a big proponent of having a multifaceted skillset. In the context of being a developer, this usually means also becoming skilled (or at least proficient) in design and marketing as well as programming. So this is clearly a win-win for both of us.
A work in progress
This whole course structure is of course subject to change. Over the course of the month I'll undoubtedly have to tweak and revise my methods as the strengths and weaknesses of this approach come to light. That being said, I'm really looking forward to the process and I'm excited to see the results of our work.
I'll be posting updates over the next few days as we dive into it.