Why I removed 95% of my web design and development courses?

August 22nd, 2017

Hi,

So I’ve been making video courses on web design and development since about 2003, and recently I removed about 95% of the courses on the Killervideostore because they were old.

Yes, most of the old courses were about 80-90% cool, in terms of the information being up to date. Nonetheless, I decided to remove them and create new courses that are now 100% up to date … and they are also very future-proof!

How can programming and development courses be future-proof?

Ah, 5-6 years I would have agreed. But since 2014 (give or take,) things have really stabilized in terms of the webstack. Think about it, all the major web frameworks:

• Java Spring
• PHP Laravel
• Node.js + Express
• Python + Django
• Ruby + Rails

… All share many of the same characteristics. All are MVC based, and all of them share similar patterns.

Yes, there are significant differences here and there, but at their core, all the frameworks do most things the same way. Bottom line: once you learn one web mvc framework, you will know a lot about all of them.

With that in mind, it has become more and more apparent to experienced developers, that the key to all this, is understanding the key principles and patterns of software development. Starting with foundation ideas like:

• Variables
• Collections
• Object oriented programming

… To more advanced coding concepts like separation of concerns, micro services, datastores (relational databases vs object databases) etc … These concepts are found in ALL the above mentioned frameworks and languages. When you get down to it, it’s all variations of the same ideas.

Key to becoming a master developer?

Learn the basic concepts well. Then jumping from one hot library, language or framework … becomes easy. I started writing code in 1994, and I’ve built commercial apps over the years with about 9 languages (lost count!) .. and that experience tells me to go back to basics every time.

That all said, any courses produced since 2015 are very much up to date since I teach the key basic concepts that will allow you to become a money making professional developer fast.

Stefan Mischook