Found the Light
After about a year (or two) of paralysis, I finally know how to move forward with Magical Dev School — particularly how I create courses and content.
What Didn’t Work
You might have heard about Learn JavaScript at this point. If you didn’t, it’s my flagship JavaScript course — and probably the greatest JavaScript course ever created on the internet.
I shall stop there because the purpose of this article isn’t to promote what I’ve done before. It’s to shed light on what didn’t work, and what’s next.
Learn JavaScript was written in a way that’s excellent for anyone trying to learn JavaScript (because it guided you step-by-step, truly, towards being able to do anything you want with JavaScript). But this way of writing left me exhausted, depressed, in pain, and fear (of having to do more of this).
Imagine writing a novel that must be continuous — from start to end. The reader benefits most when they can follow everything in sequence.
If you discover something better or if you realize you made a mistake (which always seems to happen when you’re writing) midway into the novel, you have to somehow rewrite the entire thing from the discovery or the mistake.
This meant lots of content rewrites…
Lots of rewrites…
And even more rewrites…
Which is a huge headache. A large loss of productivity. And a super difficult endeavour. Hence I don’t think I’d write another course going forward. (I reserve the right to change my mind though).
But I’m going to create recipes.
Recipes Going Forward
Like food recipes which give you instructions to whip up a good meal, I’m going to create recipes that give you instructions to whip up great code.
(Mmm… Yummy code…)
These recipes will come primarily from the way I code.
- They’ll show you how I recommend using a technology (like Astro, Svelte, CSS, or whatever).
- They’re primarily focused on “How I do it, and why” instead of “How To do something”.
- They will be my opinions on how to build a better web — based on my experiences and research.
- I’ll also give you detailed instructions and code samples to take home.
If this sounds confusing to you, you can simply think of recipes like mini-courses that cover specific topics within a bigger one.
- Like CSS Grid instead of the whole CSS Shebang
- Or maybe even a subset of CSS Grid for a specific use case that I find useful.
I hope that clears things up a little.
Currently, I have a whole list of recipes in my head
These recipes revolve around things I’ve been using recently — Astro, Svelte, and newer solutions about CSS and Layouts. (As you might expect if you’ve been following me somewhat).
Some of these recipes may potentially blow your mind and help you see (and code things) in a completely different way.
Some of these recipes are simply hygiene factors that I believe are must-haves for efficient coding (like linting, auto-formatting on save, property order, etc).
Here are some examples for Astro:
- Why I use MDX for coding most pages on Astro
- Why and how I use Svelte with Astro
- Setting up Prettier, ESLint for Astro
- Collecting Payments with Stripe while using Astro
- Authentication systems with Astro
- Etc…
I’ve also been toying around with CSS Recipes and even Responsive Typography Recipes (again, in my mind).
I’m going to begin by putting some of these recipes into Magical Dev School starting today. Then, I’ll release some of these to the public as I go along.