A Unified Web Development Curriculum
After building TestingJavaScript.com and EpicReact.dev, I'm taking on a bigger challenge: packaging everything I know about building web applications into a single, comprehensive learning path. The goal is to create a resource that can take someone from knowing nothing about programming to being able to build and maintain a production web application. That project is EpicWeb.dev.
To be clear, this will be a significant undertaking. EpicWeb.dev will be at least twice the size of EpicReact.dev, with more concepts covered and higher quality content. The tooling has also advanced considerably in the last two years, which means I can teach more material in less time than would have been possible before.
Form and Structure
The primary content format will be exercise-focused workshops, supplemented by podcasts, interviews, blog posts, and talks. Each workshop chunk corresponds to roughly six hours of in-person teaching, further broken down into six to nine exercises. Some workshops will be strictly linear, while others can be taken independently given the right prerequisites.
The centerpiece of the material is a single application that students build incrementally across all workshops. Each session focuses on specific learning outcomes achieved by extending the app in some way. By the end, students will have developed the full set of skills shared by professional web developers.
Because this includes full-stack development, there will be a substantial backend component—something EpicReact.dev didn't require. The ultimate goal is that someone with only basic literacy can start the material cold, with no prerequisite technical knowledge.
Development Process
My standard approach to creating workshop material is to first build the completed application, then strip out the parts relevant to the learning goals. For a project this large, the finished app has to be capable of teaching everything required, so it needs to be ambitious. I have a solid picture of what the application will be, but I'm not ready to share those details just yet.
I'll be live streaming the entire development process on YouTube, with frequent streams scheduled over the coming months. The app will also go through expert reviews: I plan to hire specialists to critique different aspects of what I build, and those sessions will be recorded and bundled as part of the final product.
Content production itself is a bottleneck. I need to personally build and practice delivering all the material before recording it—I don't outsource the creation of my content. If I waited for everything to be finished before releasing anything, the wait would be years. Instead, the workshops will ship in chunks.
Release Order and Timeline
The first released material will actually be the more advanced workshops, with beginner content coming later. This is a deliberate choice tied to pricing: the introductory material will be offered for free, so I'd rather not make money on beginners' aspirations. A much better business model involves your employer paying for your advanced training.
As for dates, I'm hoping to release the first chunk sometime in mid-to-late 2023, with the entire series finished by the end of 2024. Video production won't begin until each workshop has been delivered live several times, so look for tickets to those in-person sessions becoming available soon.
Scope Decisions
The material is built around a full-stack, production-scale web application, and that determines what gets covered. If a topic is essential to building that app, it's in. If not, it's out. That also means I won't be teaching multiple frameworks or presenting options for solving the same problem—part of what students pay for in technical education is a curated set of opinions rather than an exhaustive survey.
The workshops will address everything necessary for the app, which is vast. When complete, the hope is that a complete novice can start at the beginning and work straight through to the end. That's a huge amount of ground, and it's the reason this project won't be finished overnight.
