That seems to be the case with my Udemy course learning plan.
Having put together some courses to tackle in order to get back some of my development muscle memory I quickly realised that the courses are all by the same person – Brad Traversy.
My frontend learning plan
Keeping things in the presentation layer first, that’s my first step to refining my plan.
When looking at things to learn, the number of options and directions grows rapidly. Every time you read an article, or see a new ‘thing’ – another idea/direction presents itself.
As I’m also trying to experiment a bit more on the UI Interaction/Animation side of things visually, I thought it made sense to start to look into how to create some of those aspects technically.
All the things I wish I’d learned
When I was working as a developer, I didn’t have the same level of drive and curiosity that I have now.
That meant that I learnt what I needed to learn in order to get the job done – but I didn’t have the desire to experiment on my own. To find other projects to experiment with or to volunteer on for more experience.
There are a load of areas that I wish I’d explored more before now, areas such as:
- CSS Animation
- SVGs
- Flexbox & Grid layouts (I learned CSS before they were available)
- DOM manipulation (fully)
- Plenty more
I’m still certain that there isn’t an obvious resource for learning a lot of these things within the context of Interaction or Web Design – those points where visual design meetings technical implementation of the design.
Creative developer roles
I’ve discovered a number of the subjects that I want to explore further, just through spending my time learning and reading up on interesting website designs.
In an earlier post, I mentioned the process of finding job adverts and reverse engineering them to find the skills that are required and then seeking ways to learn and get some experience using those skills.
This kind of role is harder to surface.
A number of titles have shown potential, but a lot of them still focus more on core development skills, rather than the ‘creative’ overlap:
- UI Developer
- Creative Developer
- Creative Front End Developer
- UI Engineer
- Creative Coder
- Variations of the above
Whilst searching for those titles, I stumbled across the Awwwards Jobs pages these look more like they may be the kind of job that these areas would lead towards. Development work, but for creative agencies that are looking to build things that look interesting.
I may have found a source to reverse engineer!