Learn the resources available to you to help you to succeed and, indeed, excel in the Enspiral course.
Read and heed. Ask questions on the Slack channel if you are unsure about anything.
When students fail to live up to their fullest potential in this course, as in real life, it is often because they don't take full advantage of the resources available to them.
Throughout your career as a web developer or in a related field, you will often find yourself in demanding situations, and at times your resources may be limited. This can be quite frustrating.
The greatest value of Enspiral, after the opportunities to learn soft skills, is the availability of significant and easy-to-find resources. Please don't miss this opportunity to launch your career into the stratosphere.
The biggest resource available to you is your instructors. Throughout Phase-0, use the Slack channel to get help. You can also message instructors directly if it's not something you want to share with the entire channel.
- Your classmates! You're a team. Use this to your advantage starting right now.
- Follow the links we provide and investigate further, but don't go down rabbit holes. We've taken time to curate these links so that you don't waste time on incorrect or obsolete material. Take advantage of them.
- Bookmark important links! You should be curating your own links. Use your browser's bookmark manager to create a folder hierarchy to hold your web development and empathy-related bookmarks, and keep it current by weeding it regularly.
- Organize your bookmarks. A bookmark you can't find might as well not exist.
- Learn how to use the documentation. Yes, it's a lot of reading. Get used to it now. The API documentation, tutorials, standards, etc. may seem daunting at first, but they will be your best friends when you are stuck on some problem. And let us not forget Google! No one really knows how web developers worked before Google, but we think it may have involved stone knives and bearskin rugs.
- Learn how to use forums, IRC, gitter, etc. There are many tools out there for you to use to find the answer to your problem. At the top of that list is StackExchange, usually called "stack overflow". But IRC channels, gitter channels, Google forums, GitHub issues, and much more are available 24/7 with folks eager to answer your most foolish questions. Don't keep them waiting!
- Slack your instructors and teammates! Speak up! As them Romans used to say, audentes fortuna iuvat.
- Use Teamtreehouse for interactive videos and tutorials that compliment the weekly challenge. Treehouse free of charge while in Phase-0. The treehouse community forums have thousands of users who can also be of help if you are having trouble. Try their forum