Russell:
Yeah, I think I remember learning HTML from a website that I printed out. I know, right? I had it in a folder that I eventually lent to friends. Why I printed it out I don’t know. I’ll never understand why I did that.
Tom:
That doesn’t make any sense.
Russell:
I don’t know, but it worked at the time. I do remember there was … I’m trying to remember the name of the sites. I guess like W3C now has a guide [of 00:10:10] learning, so I’m guessing it may have been W3C then as well.
Tom:
I feel like that one might have been around.
Russell:
There were definitely [inaudible 00:10:16]. Also, you tend to just find blog articles of people talking about like … I guess when I was learning to code originally or learning to write HTML that was just at the time where people had done the “don’t use tables for layouts thing.” It was at that point I believe, and so lots of stuff I was learning it was like, “Don’t worry about this old technology that most of those sites would teach you to use, use this one.” That’s the kind of resources I was finding.
Tom:
Yeah. That’s cool.
Russell:
I think it was just like I printed out a website, which still baffles me to this day.
Tom:
Amazing. I wish I could remember the old sites that I looked at at the time. That was searching Alta Vista and stuff, man. That was a very different world.
Russell:
Part of it is, especially if you’re not finding many resources, is just like experimenting. I think most people will find, and this is maybe actually why we have sites like CodePen these days, because that kind of is that easy experimenting with code. It’s just like taking an example of code and playing with it yourself and instantly seeing what the change is. That’s definitely a way that I started to learn how to use that sort of stuff.
Tom:
I definitely think one major difference in say, us two, or your gener-, it’s not a different generation at all, but like that gap in people that do this stuff is that, and I think I’m all right at what I do, but it took me a long time to get good, and that might be because I’m a very slow person, or whatever, but I think it’s amazing the resources that people have now. Like, being someone who’s in to something you can go out there and find so much, and there is CodePen to play with and there is a whole community that will look at your stuff and give you feedback.
When I was doing stuff. I was doing freelance work for five, ten years to earn money, but really there was no one to tell me that the work was crap and how I should make it better, so it was quite hard I found getting that feedback in those years and I kind of wish that I’d done it now, or I wish I was a bit younger. I always wish I was a bit younger, but I feel like it’s great now because you can really put yourself out there and learn so much so quickly, and if you’re the person that can absorb that stuff the world is your oyster.
Russell:
Yeah. Absolutely.
Tom:
It’s amazing.
Russell:
Yeah. I know that there’s even services now where you have a mentor as you learn to code, and they’ll just give you feedback, and you chuck questions at them, and they’ll respond to it. I’m not sure if that’s a paid thing, but that to me is an amazing service. A friend of mine is doing some course, which is just like learning basic HTML and CSS and the course itself is like this perfect engaging, gamified version of learning how to code stuff. The resources are amazing.
Tom:
It’s incredible. It blows me away. I did have some books back then. I remember them, but they were like HTML for Dummies, or whatever. That probably still exists actually. It’s probably sold far too many copies over the years. One thing that, again, blows my mind now is that you get degrees on web design, web development. We had an intern come in, so shout out to Luke. He was doing a web development course at uni. I’m not in a position to say whether they’re good or not now, but he was coming in, and it was interesting because I’ve always said the same thing that you were saying that what you were learning was completely out of date and everything back then I looked at was wildly out of date. Like, twenty-year-old technology, or whatever.
Luke came in and he was like, “Oh, we just learned responsive web design.” That kind of surprised us because while it wasn’t like cutting edge it was way more current than you expect it to be, so I kind of feel like there’s all this extra resource of people that are really cutting edge, Treehouse, Lynda.com. There’s probably better ones than that as well. It seems like, maybe not schools, but universities are really picking up their game in terms of what they offer for people to study now.
I still feel you’d go there and you wouldn’t get like a totally great hands-on experience, and I think it’d be very hard with the way that universities and higher education works for them to actually compete with those other companies, because you got to have syllabuses and you’ve got to meet coursework deadlines and marks, rather, and do exams, and we know that in a year, or certainly three years, like, wow, how much it’s going to change.