About Me – Francis Langlois

About Me

Hi friend!

 

Ah, about me, where do I start? I love climbing mountains, cats and dogs (why choose?) and using code to create fun and interactive user experiences. I’m a self taught, nomadic, front-end dev. Since I’ve essentially learned to code from the web I decided to give back to the community.

 

The reason I felt that this blog was needed is mostly because as I was learning I found myself thinking “wow, there’s so much to learn and I have no idea where to start!” This lead to some ambitious and naive goal making such as “I’m going to master:

  • Javascript
  • jQuery
  • AngularJS
  • ReactJS
  • EmberJS
  • Gulp,
  • Grunt,
  • Webpack,
  • Ruby on Rails,
  • PHP,
  • WordPress
  • Machine learning…”

 

Well I quickly came to realize that this lead to information overload and nights of confusion. I was essentially learning a bunch of buzzwords and I had no idea what they meant. “Yeah ok Facebook you go ahead and make a virtual DOM to mess with this noob’s brain.” I was lost trying to make sense of the docs barely understanding why I couldn’t build another To Do app using whatever framework I was attempting to learn. It took building a few apps and websites for me to come to the realization that all these tools have a place and time and there’s no need to master everything at once. In fact the front-end world moves so fast that mastering the concepts that drive  the creation of these tools is what’s essential. If you master these core skills then in no time you should be able to pick up the new framework du jour to play with.

 

That’s where this blog comes in! I’ve wasted so much time and energy fretting over what to learn because I essentially had no idea what was useful and what path to take so I decided, fuck it, I’m going to learn it all.  I created this blog to help newcomers and intermediates out there follow a useful path to success. The goal of this blog is to help cut out some of the noise and give you a guide that you can use on your quest in learning how to code. I’ll be posting a series of tutorials, tips, and best practices that I’ve picked up along the way to hopefully give you a sense of direction and keep you on track.

 

Oh and spoiler alert, I didn’t master all those tools!