Trying to Teach Web Development
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Lately I've been trying to teach an awesome friend front-end web development. It's so hard to even know where to begin.
The good ole days
I started writing HTML when I was 10 years old. Back then, it was easy. We were writing our tags in all caps (HOW AWFUL), not closing tags if we didn't feel like it, frames were regarded as professional, and the animated gif was cool (some would say it still is).
I remember when Javascript became popular and JavascriptKit.com was the place to get copy and paste scripts for your site. I can remember when CSS started to become popular and when table layouts finally died out. It was easy to pick stuff. The technologies evolved at the rate that I learned them (which was awesome).
Trying to start from scratch today is pretty difficult. Things are a lot easier than they used to be (especially if you're using frameworks and such), but there is so much knowledge that you need to acquire before you can be a useful web developer.
It's possible
After a few hours typing HTML and CSS, she started to pick it up. I told her to reference W3Schools and the mighty Google. I'm pretty confident that with today's resources and some perseverance, it's possible to get started pretty quickly.