Hello, welcome to Inspect, a show about design and development. So today's episode, we're going to be talking about how to get into development. So if you're thinking about maybe a career change or a little side hobby, but we're going to try and focus on how you can get into this for pretty much free or as little cost as possible. So we're going to be covering some hardware, some software, some of the tools and some services that you might require.
And there's plenty of paid options out there, but there's also plenty of free options to get you started. So getting into web development pretty much a low barrier to entry really. Anyone can really do it. It doesn't really take much.
So let's kick it off. Yeah, first thing, of course, you're going to need some sort of computer to write your code on. Now, I mean, your computer doesn't need to be anything new or expensive. It can be pretty much anything.
Chances are you've already got one. Whether you're on Windows, whether you're on Mac, it doesn't really make a difference to anything while you get started, because all you need is a place where you can write some text. Yeah, so I don't know. Do you think that there's a minimum spec that you might need for a computer these days?
I don't think so. I think everything that's out there is fairly usable, even your low spec machines. Like you said, you just need to text it and write some code. And that's it, really.
You don't need anything amazing, like an i7 or i9 supercomputer gaming machine to do this kind of stuff. It is really, really simple stuff. So basic laptop, probably, of course, minimum, you get cheap after about 100, 100 quid, 150 quid. If that, if you get second-hand or maybe even cheaper, if you want to go really budget.
Yeah, it literally is no kind of specification for these machines to write code. It can be bog-standard. Yeah, the only thing that may be worth considering is that if your computer is still on an old operating system, like maybe an old version, a very old version of Windows, for example, you may not have the ability to upgrade to the latest web browsers. So, but I think anything that's purchased or any computer that was built or purchased in the last five to eight years should be more than sufficient.
Anything older than that, you may need to upgrade it a little bit, but it's still, it's not a complete barrier entry. So you can still get started as long as you've got access to something. Yeah, I booted up my old i5 computer. I've had that for about six, seven years now.
And I just gave it a bit of a clean up upgrade to Windows 10 on there because I'm selling the thing. And, you know, on eBay, I had to recommend value for that machines about under quid and some of them were going for about seven-equid as well. So, and it's really, really, but like you said, Windows 10 had to be installed on there. And then I think they've phased out some of the older browsers as well.
I think up to IE 10, or something, I can't remember now. It's all the Edge now. So that's a big upgrade that's taking place on a Windows machine. Yeah, exactly.
And then if you've got Mac, there's obviously running probably the last five or six versions of Mac OS. You should have the latest version of all the browsers. I don't have the support for the latest Safari goes, but I'm sure it goes back at least for five or six versions of the open system. So that shouldn't be a problem.
If you've got a computer, you're ready to go. Next thing you need is a bit of software. You're obviously going to need a web browser because you're building websites, so you need to test them. All the web browsers, pretty much all free.
There are a few paid ones, but obviously you don't need to worry about those. You need to make sure that you've got a copy of Internet Explorer if you're on Windows, a copy of Safari if you're on a Mac, and you need a copy of Chrome and Firefox, no matter which platform you're on. At the bare minimum, really. There are a few other browsers which have small user bases, but I wouldn't worry about those too much to get started.
Get yourself a copy of Chrome or Firefox, and you get to go really. Yeah, and then to write your code, you're going to need some sort of text editor. So this is not a word processor. It's not Microsoft Word.
It's not pages, Apple pages. It's an application which lets you write just plain text on a Windows machine. It comes preloaded as a notepad, and on a Mac, you've got text edit, which are the default applications. Obviously, they're both free, but if you want to take it seriously, you've got to get yourself a proper code editor.
And again, most of those are for free as well. The one that we both use is Visual Studio Code or VS Code as everyone refers to it, which is obviously brilliant. We did an episode a few months ago about some of the extensions that we like about VS Code, so it's worth listening to that one as well because you can install loads of extensions to customize your code editor. But for beginners, you don't really need to customize it.
Just use it out of the box. It's just a place for you to write some code. Yeah, definitely. I think VS Code is the one out there that really does stand out for anyone who wants to get into coding.
It's all good getting notepad or text edit or any other plain text editor. That's fine. That's the way I learned, to be honest, to be honest, to your handwritten code. Just seeing it all in black and white, getting used to seeing the writing the code, especially if you've not written code before, it might be good to just do it in a text editor first, a really basic text editor, and then move across to VS Code or one of these specified text editors that we're using.
It just makes everything a lot easier to understand. There's a lot more surrounding these text editors these days as we talked about in our previous episode. You recommend anything else apart from VS Code? I've used quite a few, but I just can't get away from VS Code.
It's probably the best one out there. Everything else that I've used is kind of just disappeared. No one talks about that kind of stuff. That was one.
It was pretty much the code you edited before VS Code came into the top spot. So, Sublime is pretty good. There's another one called Atom. That was another one.
Yeah, it's not too bad. Again, I think it's falling away to the side a little bit now. There's one by GitHub called Brackets, which I do use it. I use Brackets when I started looking for a good text editor.
Before VS Code was out there, I was using Sublime and then I had to go out Brackets and I just could not get my head around it. It's got some weird kind of workflow. I didn't quite understand, so I just dropped it. Yeah.
So, the quick VS Code is free. And it's pretty much the best one out there. So, yeah, it's one good thing. Just thinking about other software that you're going to need.
At some point, you'll probably need a terminal window or a command prompt, which is already included on your computer. Look, I said, yeah, you're going to need various browsers, which are free. You may need an FTP client, which would allow you to actually upload your website to a hosting platform. Yeah.
It's not a massive need for those these days. If you do need one, then FileZellos will be the best free version they can get. Yeah. FileZellos cross-platform is on the Macs on Windows.
Yeah. It's available everywhere. It's probably available on Linux as well, I guess. Yeah.
It allows you to do FTP as well. You've got quite a lot of hosts now. We'll get into that minute, which only allow SFTP instead of just standard FTP connection. So, FileZell is the best one.
I wouldn't say they're essential for getting your website's live. I don't think it's essential. I mean, you can use terminal to do things like that as well. Yeah.
It just depends on where you are in your development and the style of website that you're building. If you're hosting your website with GitHub and depending on where you're actually where it's going to end up in the end, you may not need files in there at all. So, yeah. But is there as an option and again?
Yeah. What about design tools just on a side note? Because if you are getting into development, you may need to do a little design work. Yeah.
They are handy, aren't they? You're going to have to picture what you're building first. So, any kind of decent design tools out there. A lot of them are paid.
That's the thing. So, I don't know if any really good free options that are available. Well, Figma is free, isn't it? Yeah.
Yeah. You've got Figma. So, the main ones that most people will reach for are going to be Sketch and Photoshop. Sketch is going to send back around about $100 for the year.
Yeah. And Photoshop. I think Adobe XD is free as well. Adobe XD is also free.
Yeah. You just need Adobe ID, which is again free. Yeah. Photoshop, if you do want to do your designs and Photoshop is around about $20 a month if you buy just a single app.
Yeah. So, again, that is a cost. $20 a month is still 240 a year. So, it may not be something that you want to do straight away.
But like I mentioned, the free alternatives are Figma. And then you've got Adobe XD. They're both good for UI design. If you need to manipulate any sort of images or any rust graphics, then there are a few other tools out there.
But you probably don't need those straight away. You've got GIMP, which is a photo insert. And I've got another one here. I think you could get away with some of those free SAS wireframe websites, which allow you to be really basic layouts and designs for your pages.
Yeah. That's an option. Yeah. So, that could potentially work.
I mean, you can't get really, really intricate with design or anything like that. Yeah. That's not a bad option. Well, you do what my friend Jay does.
He designs in the browser. Well, yeah. That's the end goal really is to be able to get to a stage where you can just lay out the site directly in code. But anyway, it's not essential to have a design tool if you want to learn.
It's just a nice to have. So, yeah, these days is probably just best to get an account for Figma or to allow you to do the most basic things at least. And then later on, if you feel that you need to, then you could always pay for a license on one of the other tools. Yeah.
And that's pretty much it for software, really. It doesn't take much at all. Text editor, a web browser, and maybe a terminal. And that's about it.
Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So, if you actually want to be a web developer, so you're going to need to learn some skills.
So, there's loads of free resources out there to actually learn how to code. The biggest one is probably YouTube, because every topic under the sun is covered by someone or the other. And yeah, you probably want to search for something like a basics of HTML, basics of CSS, basics of JavaScript, how to build your first website. First time's along those lines will probably get you in a good place.
And then moving on from there, then you can actually follow some sort of actual courses, like structured courses online as well. So, you've got three resources where you can learn. Yeah. Yeah.
We've got, I think, free code camp is the one that I've been using quite a lot, especially for JavaScript. It's HTML and things like that. I kind of picked up years ago. But for, it's a really good resource.
It's a really good place to just actually carry out tasks and mini projects and tests. So, definitely look at free code camp. I think the other ones I've got there is a hack on which is more of like a, I guess, it's like a non-acral base or blog base or website with loads of resources. It can really help you get involved and teach you quite a lot as well, in terms of HTML, basics, they cover all the basics as well.
And code Academy is another one that I just came across recently. I think it's paid. I think they've got a free trial. And then it's about 20 pounds a month.
But again, it's all structured. It's like attending university or a college. And all your courses broken down into smaller chunks. It looks pretty good.
It might give it a go actually. But it's one I stood out for the paid ones. So yeah, those are my three. Yeah.
There's also code school, which has got free tier as well. And in the free tier, they do cover a lot of the basics. So it's definitely a good place to start. If you do want to pay, Udemy has some really good courses.
And they're generally quite cheap. And they've always got some sort of sale on, especially around like holiday seasons or summer and stuff like that. They'll have a sale where they'll drop all their courses down to like $19 or something. Yeah.
So yeah, there's plenty of paid resources, but there's also loads of free ones. Even just following people on Twitter, media articles, the amount of people who are willing to just share their knowledge to say, it's just crazy. So there's definitely no shortage of places to find information. Listen to podcasts.
Obviously, you're already doing that, but there's plenty of other good podcasts out there we can learn about web development. They don't necessarily teach you how to code, but you'll learn more about the industry and the business and techniques. Yeah. So you could listen to our inspiration episode, which was back in August, so 21.
And there we talk about some of the different blogs and different websites and podcasts and people that we follow and that have inspired our careers. So yeah, good. If you check out their work and hopefully they'll inspire you as well. So once you've got all this free knowledge from the internet, you can start putting together your first website.
And then once you're built, what do you want to do? You want to share your website with the world, right? So now it's time to get that website hosted somewhere and out in the public. Now I was doing a bit of research before we started recording, and I was just looking for some free places where you can get a domain name, so your own actually website URL.
And I couldn't find any where you can get one that's completely free without some sort of caveat. Normally, if you sign up for their hosting package, like for a year, then you can get free domain. So there's quite a few services that let you do that. You can do that with Squarespace, where you can sign up for a year, you get free domain, wicks.com do that.
Most of the big hosting companies will give you a free domain for a year sign up, not only for the first year anyway, and then after the first year, you'll have to renew it. Yeah, one thing that's came to mind actually is some of these hosting companies that you go to, one that I use, it's called TSO Host, and they've got like a plan that's, I think it's about four pounds, five pounds a month, really, really basic hosting sort of setup. And what you can do when you're in the control panel is you don't need a domain name to get your website up and running. So they kind of give you these placeholder domains if you like, and you can just run your site off that, and you can create many instances of that as well.
So that could be a good place that you started talking about four or five quid a month to get started. So that could be something that people could use. Yeah, and even if you don't want to pay that, you can actually go to Netlify. Oh yeah, and they do the same thing, but it's also for free.
So you can get your code on to Netlify, they'll host it for free for, it's good for all sort of smaller basic sites, but you can host like a personal blog on there for free as well, if you want, depending on how it's been built. And what they will do is they will build a site for you and they will put it onto a temporary domain, temporary URL, which will be something like a, you know, a random number dot Netlify dot com or something like that. And that URL is public facing. So if you're happy with it, you could just stick with that.
And you can use that for all as long as you need to until you're happy with your project. And then when you want to assign it to an actual domain name that you own, then you can just pull it over. And it's all pretty easy. But if you were to just sort of buy a domain, you can buy those from places like in the UK, we have a site called 123Redge, which is one of the biggest, biggest ones where you can buy from all this heart internet.
Internationally, you've got things like GoDaddy and you've got hover.com. There's another one called like what get my name or something like that. Or yeah. But yes, if you just search for like the domain name registrar in your country, there'll be, yeah, there'll be one that covers your area.
There's hundreds of these things out there, isn't there? So yeah, exactly. And prices range from around, you know, 99p or, you know, 99 cents up to the could go to thousands depending on what you want. But for an average.com, for something that is available, you're probably looking at about 20 pounds a year.
Yeah. And yeah, it's normally built yearly. So again, it's fairly low-cost. Just not completely free.
Yeah. I think that side of this whole learning and building websites and stuff is all good. I think once you're kind of building websites for the world to see, then definitely you need a hosting environment like that. I just had a thought.
I use local by flywheel to build local websites. So when you're just learning and just starting out, that could be a really cool way to actually get started. There's loads of other tools like mamp and lamp and wamp and all these other setups that you can get to help you host a website on your local machine. But local is really good, especially if you're using WordPress.
It kind of just builds everything for you, click on the button and you're ready to go. But I guess because this WordPress is a little bit more advanced, but probably something that people might want to look into. Because I think you can just host your regular sort of site websites with that as well. So that way, another resource that might want to look at.
Yeah. Now, that's a good point. Actually, you mentioned about local hosting, local development environment. We're probably going to cover some of that in software.
But to start with, you shouldn't need it because you're going to be just writing HTML and CSS. It's going to be static files. But as you get more and more advanced, you're going to be wanting to write some sort of dynamic websites and you're going to need to be doing that locally on your own laptop before you push it to the world, which is what we mean by local development. But that's something that you can learn later.
Again, it is totally free. You can use, like you said, a service like mamp, which is a PHP Apache based local server and there's a free version. We can just use a terminal and use something like node, node.js for a local server, again, completely free. But we won't get into that now.
It's just something worth considering later on. Yeah. Yeah. Okay.
So now you've got your site built. You've got your site hosted either on a free domain or on your own personal domain. Next thing, you need to let people know about it. So you need to do some basic marketing at least.
And what's the best way of being the word out there these days? Social media. So, yeah, just, you don't need, it doesn't need cost and thing is all you need is a social media account. And you can join communities of like-minded people, depending on what your project is that you want to promote, you can just push it to your own personal network.
But you might want to at some point do some email marketing where you might have a form on your website where you have your email addresses, send out a newsletter. And even with email marketing, you can get started for free as again, I think if you go to MailChimp, but they've got free tier, MailChimp is probably the easiest one to get started with. They've got a really nice interface and it's quite, not to be cross, but it's quite idiot-proof. Yeah.
But yeah, you can, with MailChimp, you can send out to 2,000 people for free. So that's more than enough to get your business started if you're trying to turn this into business. Yeah. So, your marketing is free as well.
So, basically, it doesn't really take much to get into a development. What it takes really is once you've got your computer and a couple of based and qubit-ish resources, the biggest cost is going to be time, really. And as long as you've got plenty of that, you should be fine. Yeah, definitely.
I think the key thing here is going to be the learning aspect of it. People want to get their head down really focus on writing code, especially if you've never done it before. The resources that are out there are just ridiculous. And back in the day when we were doing this kind of stuff, we never had this luxury of making up all this knowledge that's already available out there.
Yeah. It's just YouTube. I wish YouTube was around when I first started studying. Pretty much all of my learning on YouTube now.
Everything comes from there. Okay, cool. Just another thing. I came across this website today, came up on my RSS feed.
It was a link shared by onkyat.com, which is a design technology blog. I don't know how to pronounce it. It's about H-O-N-G and then K-I-A-T. Anyway, every week they push out an article like Fresh Resources for Web Designers and Developers.
I think a monthly entry. And one of the links they shared was a website called Free for Dev. So the URL is free-4.dev. They were weird on.
But someone's just basically put to the Visual Policy Tree of links on different development-related services and providers and stuff like that, which are free. So it came out a good time really because they electrically came on my RSS feed this morning. And on there, it's got stuff like CDNs and design and UI resources, DNS staff, emails, code editors, and then tools for team collaboration. It's got all other stuff we're posting.
So yeah, as we're looking through that list as well. You probably find some other free resources. It's quite a long list and it's definitely not like a beginner's list. It's more useful for someone who's been in the industry for a while and is looking to do maybe a bit more complex development.
But yeah, it's the worst checking out. That was a bit odd looking at that as well. Yeah, that's pretty much it. Quite a short episode.
It's quite easy to get into web development for free. There's nothing really stopping you from giving it a go. Why not? Yeah.
And just to head up, try and bypass all the Hello World stuff as well, especially if you're learning online with CodeCampbell, or similar online learning websites and really getting yourself involved in writing some really functional code. Obviously, they always start with the Hello World. It's a 16-shade, isn't it? Yeah.
I mean, if you're completely new to the language, then yeah, it's good to know those basics on how to get some text onto the screen or how to add some numbers to get there and so on. Yeah. Like I said, yeah, it's worth having a real world project in mind if you've got one. And it doesn't have to be too complicated.
You could just think of a site that you already use and just try and maybe recreate a part of it. You don't even have to read it the whole thing. So that's good idea actually. Yeah, just a little part of it.
A blog is always a good way to start for learning to learn. Because what you're doing, you're creating a list of items, and then you're going into an item, and then you're displaying various details about that blog post, you know, an image, a title, a date. So you're working with different data types, you're working with different pages and page templates and things like that. So yeah.
And it's very text-based as well. So it doesn't really require any design skills, it's more about structure. So yeah, the blog is quite a good place to start. Right.
Yeah. Okay. That was nice and easy. Maybe we'll do something similar for how to get into design as well.
Because a lot of it is the same, but there are a few obviously tool changes and learning resources that are going to be different. And there's generally a little bit more cost involved when you're getting into design. Yeah, we can have a think about that one and maybe do that one in the next couple of weeks. Yeah, that'd be good.
All right. Good stuff. Before we go, you go to your recommendations for this week? I do one second.
So I picked up a book that I was reading on holiday, and it's called The Cell Art Not Giving a ****, and it's a Cal Intitutive Approach to Living of Good Life by Mark Menson. I've seen people sharing photos of the cover on Instagram and Twitter and things like that. So I thought, let me just pick it up and see what it's about. And I started reading on the plane before I knew it.
I was 50 pages in. So it is pretty good. Definitely worth picking up. Yeah.
I was actually quite close to buying it myself. I was in, I went to Austria last week and again, I was at the airport and I saw it there. And I remember my brother got the book and he had to, I think he'd put a picture of it on Instagram or something. Yeah.
I was close to getting it, but I had a short flight. So I thought, sorry, I'm not going to read on the plane now. But you won't get up to plane trust me. You just be stuck.
You'll be in the book. It's really good. Okay. So what's it called again?
And who's the way? The Cell Art Not Giving a **** by Mark Menson. Okay. That'll be in the show.
This week, I've probably just going to recommend a game actually. I've been playing the new Legend of Zelda, Link's Awakening on, well, it's not news and all game, but the remake of it on Nintendo Switch. I just completed that today, actually. And I was completely the final level.
But I've been playing it for a couple of weeks now, and I've never played the original before, the Game Boy version. So it was completely new game to me. But because I played a link to the past on the Super Nintendo before, this game is very, very similar. So although it wasn't very difficult, it was good fun game, especially after playing Breath of the World on the Switch, which was ridiculously hard in comparison.
This was a nice, easy, low-impact game. You have to worry about it to work. You can spend 20 minutes on it, put it away. It's a sort of game I like, really.
I don't like to take things too seriously with gaming. But yeah, it's good fun. It looks, the graphics are really nice. It's very cute and cartoony aesthetic to go on for the same.
But yeah, it's just a generally a good fun game. It's not difficult. And if you've ever played the Game Boy version, then you'll probably love this one. Nice.
Yeah, it's good. Good fun. Okay, cool. Well, hopefully this episode has shown you that the barrier to get into web development is pretty low.
So there's nothing stopping you from doing it if that's something you're thinking about. So yeah, come and join myself and become world developers and we'll go on this journey together. But until then, yeah, we'll catch you in the next episode and we are signing off. So bye-bye.
Bye. Thank you for listening to the show. Be sure to subscribe in your podcast player and feel free to drop a rating or review in Apple Podcast. You can follow the show on Twitter at Inspector Fem and find the show notes for today's episode and full archive of all shows over at Inspector Fem.
Honkke, honkke, honkke, honkke. Yeah, I used to use that back in the day. Hell, do you say that honkke at honkke at? I don't know.
Honkke at. Okay.