In February I spoke at London Web Standards and West London Coders events. I have spoken before (on email development and also on learning new things) many years ago, so it was nice to get back into the swing of speaking at well organised events with an engaged and knowledgable audience.

I wanted to highlight how different the learning experience is for a front end developer today compared to 10 years ago when I started learning development. Using devices, access to the source code and the complex tools we use in modern development as examples of where things have changed, not necessarily for the better when starting to learn.

The video for the talk is online to watch at https://vimeo.com/215200653, as recorded at the London Web Standards event and Tom Morris took detailed notes which you can read at https://tommorris.org/posts/9474.

Both event were well attended and my talk prompted some great discussion and I hope inspired some people to continue to learn web technologies and not get disheartened by stumbling blocks that appear during the learning process.

From the reaction to the talk in person and online, I think that I was not wrong in my assumptions and the experience has changed and is not necessarily going to inspire new developers, especially those who are learning in isolation without support on hand whenever needed.

If you need any help learning web development, you can always let me know on twitter and I’ll help you any way I can.