Tutorials for Past You

TLDR: Write a web development tutorial for Past You.

The Prompt

Write a blog post that is a walkthrough of some aspect of web development. Your audience is Past You: the person who started WDI 10 weeks ago.

The topic may be something you have already learned, something we covered in class that feels shaky, or something entirely new. The choice is yours as long as it is on an at-least intermediate-level concept. For instance, a tutorial on designing a simple webpage with HTML and CSS would not be acceptable, but a tutorial on incorporating media queries or CSS grids would.

Whatever your topic, the outcome should be a step-by-step guide that goes from Point A to some Point B. An inexperienced developer who reads your blog post and follows the instructions should have a thing that does something by the end of it.

Here are some offhand ideas:

• Things we've covered:
  • Deploying a Rails app to Heroku
  • How to set up a MEAN app
  • How to turn a Sinatra app into a Rails app
  • Understanding Javascript promises
  • Making a game in Javascript
  • Adding jQuery to a site
  • Managing Git teams
  • Updating your Bash profile
  • CRUD with AJAX using an object-oriented structure
• Things we haven't/won't cover in this class
  • React.js
  • Meteor.js
  • Bootstrap's Javascript
  • Firebase / Angularfire
  • Python / Django

The Motivation

A tutorial blog post isn't something you just write out of the goodness of your heart. It provides:

• ...an excellent way of synthesizing things you've learned. Your WDI instructors usually feel like a concept hasn't "clicked" until they've been forced to articulate it as a tutorial or lesson plan.
• ...a way of getting your name out there. If you're this far in WDI, odds are you've at least skimmed a couple code blog posts by now -- and if you have, odds are many, many other developers have as well. The people who wrote those blog posts are remembered.
• ...excellent leverage for getting a job. At least one of your WDI instructors has gotten a paid job based on a code blog post they wrote. Tutorials indicate that you're passionate, you have expertise, and you have communication skills.

The Deliverable

By 9:00am on Monday, January 4th, please submit as an issue to this repo containing:

• A link to your public-facing tutorial (i.e. not a Google Doc; something that would theoretically show up in a Google search)
  • https://gist.github.com
  • http://codepen.io/posts/
  • https://wordpress.com/
  • https://pages.github.com
  • https://www.tumblr.com/
  • https://jekyllrb.com/
  • https://medium.com/
• Anything specific on which you would like feedback
• Any other thoughts or questions

You may host your tutorial on "ready-to-go" site like Tumblr or Blogspot. However, you're very strongly encouraged to show your chops by hosting it on a page of your creation.

Remember that Github Pages is free and easy!

Your squad instructor will respond to whichever specific points of feedback you requested in your Github issue.

You are also strongly encouraged to share your tutorial by submitting it to a content aggregator site. For example, r/webdev, news.ycombinator.com, and r/programming.

Go forth!

You may of course communicate with others on your post. However, every WDI student is expected to have written their own unique tutorial.

Keep in mind: This may be something you want to attach to your own personal webpage, along with your résumé and other Outcomes deliverables!