I started looking up plans online and built a bench and table. From there I've built various other pieces of furniture - tables, benches, shelves etc. It's mostly as others have said, trial and error.
Wood is pretty forgiving, especially soft woods like pine/spruce/cedar.
It's mostly just finding plans and ideas online and YouTube. Then taking your time. Like anything else, you have to enjoy it. I personally like how different it is from programming.
Definitely worth it for me, higher_quality_furniture++
Yup ignore it. Front-end dev is super complex these days! I started when it was just HTML/CSS. JavaScript dev these days is much more complex than some 'real' programming languages!
JavaScript wasn't too complex back in the HTML/CSS days though. Lets be honest, we viewed it as a toy to sprinkle in some slick UI. Then some jQuery scripts started getting really out of control. Then I think ember and angular came out, or maybe it was backbone. Then things just kind of got more and more complex. Webpack is insane to learn. I finally took the time to learn it in isolation with es6, away from the heavy frameworks, and it wasn't so bad. But then when I look at using it with the heavy frameworks it makes me want to run for the hills.
I was playing around with puppeteer recently, which is a fantastic tool. It's perfect for what I needed. After I put together an ugly procedural proof of concept I wanted to figure out how to do things right and move it into classes. It's an adventure figuring out the right way to layout a project or even the right way to build a class. The fact that there isn't an authoritative answer tells me the eco-system is not mature or maybe I just didn't Google it right.
Meanwhile, PHP has https://www.php-fig.org/psr/. So anytime I can't remember how to name an Interface or an Abstract or anything really, I just google $blah + php psr. JavaScript is a shitshow that I have to live with, unfortunately. I know its funny coming from a guy that just used PHP as example for good language design, but at least the community has coalesced around standards...and composer > npm.
Its to the point now that I actively avoid making dynamic pages and SPAs AT ALL COSTS. It reduces the complexity of the code a ton that way. Thats not to say I haven't. I used VueJS for a big SPA because marketing wanted feature sets that required it. I fought it and lost. VueJS wasn't so bad, at least the learning curve was less than React, but SPAs are still terribad. Yuck.
We're currently using Level now and it's definitely different from Slack. I think the biggest issue we have with it at this point is that it's still in active development.
It's also missing a lot of things that you take for granted with Slack. Things like auto-link expansion and third-party integrations of any kind.
Curious - what do you use? any suggestions of good serverless NoSQL? with the built in auth and extras Google/Firebase offer? What about relational? I've used Back4App, but with it being small and FB having killed Parse, it wasn't right.
Have you looked at Sanity [1]? You get both a fast cloud backend (with a powerful GraphQL-like query language with joins, transactions, object-level security, text matching, real-time change notification, etc.) and a collaborative editing front end (optional, but recommended!). The latter is open source and modular. You can deploy serverless just like Firebase/Firestore. Gatsby is a popular way to serve Sanity.
Disclosure: I've contributed to their database tech, but I don't work for Sanity. Mostly just a fan.
