Introduction
Course Objective
Hello! And welcome to the Fox Game Project course! The objective of this course is to give you a peak into how I solve problems. I've been a professional developer for over a decade and coding much longer than that. I'm not saying I'm the best dev or even necessarily one you want model your own thinking after, but I do believe I'm an efficient developer who regularly ships good code. Hopefully along the way you can pick up some different ways of approaching problems and that can help you sharpen your own way of thinking about writing code.
This course isn't intended to teach you anything new. That is to say, the objective of this course is take code skills you have and apply them to building a project, one that we'll build together along the way. I'm sure some of the things I show you along the way will be helpful and I'll be sure to explain things along the way, but the purpose here is for you and me to pair code a new project along the way.
Let's have fun!
Who Are You?
You are a frontend developer.
This course isn't intended to teach how to become a frontend developer, there two courses on Frontend Masters I'd recommend you look at for that: the Bootcamp and Intro to Web Dev v2, both courses with me as a teacher (the Bootcamp has the amazing Jen Kramer, too.)
So you should have a beginner level grasp at least of HTML, JavaScript, and CSS. If you don't feel comfortable yet with any or all of those, please take one of the above courses first; you'll get more out of this course then. If you've used Node.js to use tools (like Webpack or TypeScript) before, that'll help too. We'll only lightly dabble with those tools, so it's okay if this will be your first time with them.
Set Up Instructions
Before we get off to the races, I have a few things I would love for you to set up.
- Install Node.js. This lists many ways of installing Node.js and it's up to you which one to choose. I use nvm.
- Install Visual Studio Code! This is optional, obviously, but I'll be sharing a lot about VSCode as we go, and who knows, if you're not using it already you might like it!
Font, Theme, and Prompt
I use Dank Mono with ligatures enabled and the default Dark+ theme for VSCode. For my shell, I use zsh with the Spaceship ZSH prompt. I did pay for the Dank font (years ago, still use it and love it so totally worth it) but I know not everyone wants to pay for a font. Cascadia Code from Microsoft is a great free code font with ligatures and what I use in the terminal.
Where to File Issues
I write these courses and take care to not make mistakes. However when teaching hours of material, mistakes are inevitable, both here in the grammar and in the course with the material. However I (and the wonderful team at Frontend Masters) are constantly correcting the mistakes so that those of you that come later get the best product possible. If you find a mistake we'd love to fix it. The best way to do this is to open a pull request or file an issue on the GitHub repo. While I'm always happy to chat and give advice on social media, I can't be tech support for everyone. And if you file it on GitHub, those who come later can Google the same answer you got.
Who Am I?
My name is Brian Holt. I'm presently (as of writing) a senior program manager over Visual Studio Code and JavaScript on Azure at Microsoft. That means I'm trying to make Azure a place you want to deploy your code and VSCode the best tool to write code with. I've taught a lot of lessons on Frontend Masters and used to be on the frontend development podcast Front End Happy Hour. Previous to that, I was a cloud advocate for Microsoft and a staff JavaScript / Node.js engineer at LinkedIn, Netflix, Reddit, Needle, KSL.com, and NuSkin. I'm also stoked to be a board member of the amazing organization Vets Who Code.
My biggest passions in life are people and experiences. I hope by going through this course that it can improve your life in some meaningful way and that you in turn can improve someone else's life. My beautiful wife and I live in Seattle, Washington in the United States of America with our cute little Havanese dog Luna. I'd almost always rather be traveling and have been fortunate to see over forty countries in the past six years.
Please catch up with me on social media, would love to chat:
Why was this course created?
I love to teach. It's a challenging task that forces you to peel back all the knowledge you've gained so you can approach someone who lacks the same experience and terminology you have. It forces you to take amorphous concepts floating in your brain and crystalize them into solid concepts that you can describe. It forces you to acknowledge your gaps in knowledge because you'll begin to question things you know others will question. For me to ever master a concept, I have to teach it to someone else.
Unfortunately life gets in the way. These courses take dozens of hours to prepare and to get right. While I'd love to just create content all day, I have a (awesome) day job at Microsoft that demands and deserves my full attention. However I'm grateful to the team at Frontend Masters for giving me deadlines and incentive to create these courses and then allowing and encouraging me to open source the materials. Not everyone has the money to pay for these courses which is why these materials are and will be forever open source for you to reference and share. I think the video content is pretty good too and so I'd encourage you to take a look at the videos on Frontend Masters too if that's in the cards for you.
And hey, if you could take a second and star the repo on GitHub I'd be super appreciative. It helps me reach more people.