Building projects is definitely an excellent way to boost your skills! I'm going to shamelessly plug our site, https://www.frontendmentor.io/.
We handle the project ideas and designs, so you can focus on the coding. We try to make it as close to a real-world development workflow as possible. We've got five different difficulty levels and as you get to the Intermediate, Advanced, and Guru levels, there a many full-stack options, if that's something that interests you.
Hope you find something you like and best of luck!
Thanks a lot! Yeah, building projects is such a great way to learn. I'm hoping the site can help people grow their experience and also confidence as developers by working through the challenges.
I'd love to get your thoughts on my side project Frontend Mentor. I created the site to provide professional designs so that people can practice their front-end coding skills in a realistic workflow.
As developers, we're often not the best at UI design. So Frontend Mentor takes the design aspect out of the equation and allows people to focus on the code.
When a solution is submitted on the platform you also receive an automated report containing an accessibility audit and HTML validation check.
There's a community aspect to it as well, so people can give each other code reviews and feedback.
Talking about feedback, I'd love to hear what you think of the site. If you have any suggestions please comment!
At the moment anyone who finishes a challenge can post in the Slack community for others to see and comment on. The next stage will be to build out a web app where users can submit solutions for others to view and comment on.
The problem with including a solution is that I don't want it to become a crutch. It would be too easy for people to just look at the solution when they hit an issue, instead of debugging and asking questions. My aim for the challenges is for people to learn by using a real-life workflow, so having a solution available doesn't feed into that.
Perhaps when the web app is up there could be some notion of "Done", at which point a solution would be made available.
I'm open to ideas on this, because I've been going over it a lot and talking to users and still not found a good path.
Thanks for the feedback! The next stage will be to build out an actual web app where users can submit solutions and see each other's work easily and comment.
Now that I've got people doing the challenges, I'm talking to them to see exactly what they feel would improve the offering. The points you made about the solutions being visible is a common one already. At the moment people just post the URL in the Slack community or on Twitter.
I’m a Front-end/JavaScript developer and web development instructor at General Assembly in London. Over the years I’ve seen lots of students who struggle to find projects to practice on once they’ve learned the fundamentals of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.
So I built Frontend Mentor as a place where people can come to improve their front-end skills whilst using a real-life workflow. Each challenge provides mobile & desktop designs, assets, starter code, project brief, and a front-end style guide. The rest is up to the individual.
All challenges are free and there’s a Slack community if you need any help on one of the projects.
I’ve literally just launched this last week, so I’d love some feedback if you can spare the time.
We handle the project ideas and designs, so you can focus on the coding. We try to make it as close to a real-world development workflow as possible. We've got five different difficulty levels and as you get to the Intermediate, Advanced, and Guru levels, there a many full-stack options, if that's something that interests you.
Hope you find something you like and best of luck!