Laravel and Context

There is value in studying Laravel and context. By this I mean that over a year ago I wanted to study Angular but after feeling lost in Javascript I decided to take a step back, to study JavaScript. I studied two or more courses over a period of months. I could have followed a single course and claimed that I knew and understood JavaScript but that would have been misleading.

The value in studying two, three or more courses is that each teacher, and each course takes a different approach, and each approach fills in gaps that are left open by others. By studying three or more courses on JavaScript I gained a better contextual understanding of what JavaScript can do, as well as how it works.

Eventually I did return to JavaScript but I encountered another challenge. I don’t understand the error messages yet, because I haven’t come across them. That’s when I decided to circle around and study PHP from the ground up and that’s where I found comfort. I like PHP because errors are clear. They are usually literal. There is an error at this line and it’s easy to debug.

After becoming more confident with PHP I started to rework my personal website so that pages went from being basic html pages that were decades old, with css added recently, they were php pages. Eventually I felt confident enough to step into the world or Laravel.

I began by experimenting with one laravel tutorial on the laravel website, before following the tutorial but changing certain names. It worked well. I was able to create website sections and update content and more. I did get stuck when I wanted to make content visible to non logged in users.

That’s when I decided to follow a course. The course is “Let’s Learn Laravel” by Brad Schiff. It is a comprehensive course, over fourteen and a half hours that teaches you how to create pages, users, models, use middleware, policies, how to create chat rooms and more. On the topic of chat rooms I find it interesting.

He often says “this is outside the scope of the course so I won’t go into the details” but I have already been into depth by following Vanilla JavaScript courses. I would struggle to write the code from scratch, but if I see the code in front of me then I do understand what it does, to some degree. On this specific topic he also points us to node.js packages that do most of the work for us.

The reason I follow Udemy coures, that I buy at 9.99 or 11USD, when they’re on sale, rather than follow hours of courses on YouTube is that they’re comprehensive. They also have to adhere to a certain standard. I also use Linkedin Learning for courses.

My website is decades old, and it has gone from html, to html with CSS, to static php. By learning to use Laravel it will become dynamic. It will serve to prove that I understand what I am doing. It will help to build up my confidence, and my portfolio.