The Watch and Code Blog

The Dream

2016-04-27T00:00:00+00:00

I wrote this post after a student asked me what makes Watch and Code different from other sites.

The Dream

Watch and Code is inspired by the dream, the world I’d create if I had unlimited time and resources. In the dream, there are only three things: you, an amazing teacher, and a project you really care about.

In the dream, you work with your teacher to figure out how to build the project piece-by-piece, starting with the simplest of things. At each step, your teacher explains exactly what you need to know. Nothing more, nothing less. The two of you repeat this until the project is finished.

Along the way, you learn all the things you need to make the project, as you’re making it. This motivates you even more, but you’re not motivated by the knowledge, you’re motivated by the new things you can do with that knowledge.

And since there are so many similarities between different projects, you have the power to bring your ideas to life. But you still don’t feel quite comfortable yet, so you do a few more projects with your teacher. By this point, your teacher is just there for motivation. The teacher disappears, but to your surprise, you feel completely at peace.

There are a few important things to notice.

Topics are never taught in isolation so that you know when, why, and how to use something.
Knowledge by itself is meaningless. What’s important is what you can do with that knowledge.
This is not an endless treadmill. The end goal is independence so that you can learn things on your own.

With this as a starting point, I began working backwards to adapt the dream to the constraints of reality. This effort is Watch and Code.

The Existing Order

The existing order is not reaching for the dream. It’s trying to move the broken models we have in the real world to the internet. It’s replicating a nightmare.

In this nightmare, you take forever to learn discrete topics in isolation. Then one day, almost by magic, you’re expected to put the pieces together on your own to do something useful.

By the time you figure out the game and get the confidence to speak up, you may find that the existing order is quick to blame you. You might hear that this is really hard, not everyone can do it. Or that not everyone has the discipline. Maybe there’s another career for you.

The existing order creates so many courses and lessons that nobody can finish. Then it’s easy to say, well there are more courses. This is the promised land for companies trying to make money but a nightmare for people trying to learn. And that’s if you’re lucky.

In other cases you can’t finish because the “teaching” is too confusing and makes huge leaps in difficulty. Simple things appear to be really complicated because the author is more concerned with sounding smart than actually teaching. Or even worse, there are errors in the material and it doesn’t make sense.

Just when you think it’s all over and manage to finish something, you get this fleeting moment of satisfaction until you realize that what you learned isn’t what you actually need. So you hop back on the hamster wheel again, cross your fingers, and hope it’ll work out before your patience runs out.

The Single Piece of JavaScript on Hacker News

2016-03-17T00:00:00+00:00

This video was inspired by a tweet Sam Altman wrote last year.

Sam’s tweet caught my attention because it wasn’t obvious to me that Hacker News had any JavaScript at all. So of course, I wanted to figure out what it did and how it worked. I thought it would be weird and complicated, but it turned out to be quite the opposite. You’ll have to watch the video to see what I mean.

This was also inspired by my students — I just had a hunch that it would be a really cool example because a lot of them are startup people and Hacker News readers.

I spend a lot of time looking for and writing realistic code examples because I know it makes a huge difference for my students. As a kid, it was hard for me to stay motivated because the subjects I was learning didn’t seem very useful. Using unrealistic code (like most tutorials do today) creates the same problem that turned me away from school all those years ago.

As you’re watching, make sure to stay tuned till the end of the video because there’s a very special offer that lasts through the end of this month (March 2016). I got the idea for the offer from one of my favorite Paul Graham essays, Do Things that Don’t Scale. I’m guessing many of you have already read it. If not, set aside a few minutes to read it today.

If you liked this post, please help me out by sharing it on your social networks. And if you’re on Twitter, say hi! I’m @gordon_zhu.

Debugging JavaScript for beginners

2016-02-16T00:00:00+00:00

If you don’t know how to use the debugger, drop everything you’re doing and watch these videos now. This is required viewing and you can thank me later.

From the hundreds of individual conversations I’ve had with new programmers, a shockingly small number have even been exposed to any sort of debugging tool. Most do not even know what debugger is. This was especially hard to understand, given that many had completed very long and difficult courses on JavaScript. The reason for this is very simple. Almost no beginning programming resources explain how to use it. This post is my attempt to help the situation.

Angular Course update complete

2016-02-01T00:00:00+00:00

This morning, I added the final 25 videos to the brand new Angular Course (there are 115 videos in total). These new videos cover all the remaining features including launching your app and lots and lots of practice with directives.

Resetting and caching $firebaseArray in our partyService.
Refactoring the party form into your first custom directive.
Refactoring the party table into your second directive.
Form validation and error handling in our register and login pages.
Writing another directive for reducing repetition in the register and login pages.
Launching your application!

You can find a full outline of the course in the “Class Curriculum” section at at the link below:

https://watchandcode.com/courses/angular-course/

This was a massive effort that took many months of hard work, hundreds of hours of filming, numerous rewrites, and dozens of conversations with students to get things just right.

I really do believe that this is the finest Angular tutorial that you can get in the world. I’m incredibly proud of what I’ve put together and hope that it helps you in your career or gives you the inspiration to build that startup idea in your head.

So as you’re going through the course (or even just the free sample), please take a second and let me know how I’m doing (good or bad). I’m always trying to improve and your feedback is the most important thing that helps me get better.

An entirely new Angular Course!

2015-12-26T00:00:00+00:00

We’re excited to announce the early release of an entirely new Angular Course with a ton of improvements that make this version really special.

We spent a ton of time on improving code quality:

We worked with Google to code review the “Wait and Eat” app and it’s now featured as an official Firebase example.
We painstakingly incorporated recommendations from the Angular style guide so you’ll get real hands-on practice with Angular best practices as endorsed by the Angular Team.

There are entirely new topics that were not covered in the previous course:

Complex custom directives.
Handling error messages from promises.
Client-side validation with Angular forms.
Using NodeJS to send texts and emails.

Finally, everything has been updated to use the latest versions:

Uses the latest stable version of AngularJS, version 1.4.x.
Uses the latest stable version of AngularFire from Firebase.