teaching-web Teaching Web at Manchester Met

List all resources

So what can I do over the summer?

Summer is your chance to figure out what you like about web development and try and get good at it. Coding, design, usability – any one of these is more than enough for an entire career in the web industry.

Use this time to get as comfortable as you can with code and debugging it. If you are doing Agency Ready or a practical web project, the more time you spend now – reading code, studying it, understanding what each line does, using a web inspector in your browser to find out what’s going on – will pay off next academic year.

You will be reaching real understanding when you can predict what your code will do before you refresh the page.

What to do first

Taking things further

Client work and your final year project

If you are doing a practical web project, you will need to learn how to work with a client: try watching this video from Mike Montiero as a starting point (it starts about 40 minutes in, but you can always go back to the start):

Watch and Learn

Remember you have access to Lynda.com, with lots of code and design tutorials. Lynda.com also has an app so you can watch the videos offline.

Many conferences also post their talks online: here’s the Front End North talks from 2018. Some conferences list the resources their speakers use: here’s an example from the last An Event Apart conference in Seattle.

Watch Jen Simmons talk about how layouts have changed on the web and how things will keep changing:

You can watch Jen Simmons live code a grid layout in front of an audience (listening to people explain their process can be even more useful than seeing the final result), and sign up to her Layout land YouTube channel.

Read and Learn

MDN is the Mozilla Developer Network, publishing all sorts of developer resources:

Books for designers and developers

HTML

You will loose marks if you can’t write semantic, clean HTML.

Accessibility

Accessibility and HTML are closely related – see Heydon Pickering’s book above. You can’t master HTML without thinking about accessibility at the same time.

Usability/UXD

Even if you aren’t doing UXD any website you make will be improved if you think about the user first.

CSS

Front-end developers need to demonstrate they are comfortable researching and using new CSS every time they start a new project. Designers need to understand CSS to create buildable designs.

JavaScript for front end developers

JavaScript will be something all employers of front-end developers will be looking for. Start with the basics: learning a framework will only cause you problems when it’s discarded for the next cool thing.

Front end development in general

Design and Typography

Starting with typography (and reading the content) is a good way in to any design task.

Long reads

Complete books published on the internet. This is by no means a complete list.

Some classic blog posts to read

It’s important that you think in a web-focussed way. Graphic design is an important precursor to web design but our needs and contexts are different. Of all of these, read The Dao of Web Design first. Even though it’s 17 years old, the ideas are still highly relevant.

Even people who have been doing this a long time find learning new things difficult. Little and often is better than trying to master everything in one day.

Read, practice, breathe. Read, practice, breathe. Read, practice, breathe.