As a part-time web developer, I started to learn web development about a year ago. With the help of my friend, Tao Huang, we began writing our first web application during our last semester at Peking University. After that, we developed a web application that has been used in three pitch competitions in both the United States (Harvard and MIT) and China (iWeekend).

I utilized my part-time to write programs, which, in turn, won me a free flight to Boston so that I could meet my friends there and get this funny picture with those venture capitalists. Though I am not quite keen on entrepreneurship, I would definitely be happy if I could visit my friends all over the world for free by putting in little effort in front of a computer.

From my point of view, entrepreneurship or startup is just about an idea, which, with probability one, has been thought through by millions of people before. But the difference is that today we have the tools to turn those used-to-be-difficult ideas into practice within few days.

Fact zero: Have an idea? Start make something. Anything that makes your life better.

Another thing I realized is that at least three of my schoolmates in CMU’s CS department specialized in web related realm had never heard of Git or Ruby on Rails before I told them. Though the sample is small, this fact astonishes me as well. No doubt why ;people would find me to write web application.

On the other hand, I have learned HTML, CSS, Javascript, PHP and jQuery and have written programs collaboratively with Tao through Git since a year ago. And now we are writing a website for CMU Summit – US-China Innovation and Entrepreneurship Forum using Ruby on Rails. And we keep learning new things like Backbone and Less.

Fact one: Who cares about 5-year irrelevant experience? Only your dedication and intelligence matters.

As nowadays, the issue of the infrastructure on the server side is settled by other brilliant web developers and there are many many open source tools online ready for you to use. It really requires nothing for a novice to build web application that would amazes everyone, plus within few days.

Fact two: Everything has been set up. It’s time to take your leap of faith.

These facts lead to a question: is it possible to gather people with zero exposure to web development to build a website from scratch?

That sounds too ambitious, isn’t it? Here is a more realistic plan. I am going to post several articles during the following months (maybe years) to share my experience in web development with you who are interested in web development.

My roadmap is to first introduce basics of HTML and CSS. And after that, we are going to dive into Less and get a glimpse at Bootstrap. Then we are going to start looking at javascript and jQuery, perhaps Backbone.js. Finally we will land on Ruby on Rails which provides a framework for web applications and knit the things mentioned before all together. Git probably will cut in halfway. And Heroku is a good place to deploy the application if you don’t have any server at hand. By the end of the series posts, hopefully, everyone who’s following along will be able to write web applications on your own.

Well, that sounds ambitious, too. We will see how far we can go. Hope you will love it.

By the way, since I don’t know which is the best practice, any comments or advices are welcome.

From my point of view, entrepreneurship or startup is just about an idea, which, with probability one, has been thought through by millions of people before. But the difference is that today we have the tools to turn those used-to-be-difficult ideas into practice within a few days.

Fact zero: Have an idea? Start making something. Anything that makes your life better.

Another thing I realized is that at least three of my schoolmates in CMU’s CS department who specialized in web-related realms had never heard of Git or Ruby on Rails before I told them. Though the sample is small, this fact astonishes me as well. No wonder why people would find me to write web applications.

On the other hand, I have learned HTML, CSS, Javascript, PHP and jQuery and have written programs collaboratively with Tao through Git since a year ago. And now we are writing a website for CMU Summit - US-China Innovation and Entrepreneurship Forum using Ruby on Rails. And we keep learning new things like Backbone and Less.

Fact one: Who cares about 5-year irrelevant experience? Only your dedication and intelligence matter.

As of nowadays, the issue of infrastructure on the server side is settled by other brilliant web developers and there are many open source tools online ready for you to use. It really requires nothing for a novice to build web applications that would amaze everyone, plus within a few days.

Fact two: Everything has been set up. It’s time to take your leap of faith.

These facts lead to a question: is it possible to gather people with zero exposure to web development to build a website from scratch?

That sounds too ambitious, doesn’t it? Here is a more realistic plan. I am going to post several articles during the following months (maybe years) to share my experience in web development with you who are interested in web development.

My roadmap is to first introduce the basics of HTML and CSS. And after that, we are going to dive into Less and get a glimpse at Bootstrap. Then we are going to start looking at Javascript and jQuery, perhaps Backbone.js. Finally, we will land on Ruby on Rails which provides a framework for web applications and knits together all the things mentioned before. Git probably will cut in halfway. And Heroku is a good place to deploy the application if you don’t have any server at hand. By the end of the series of posts, hopefully, everyone who’s following along will be able to write web applications on their own.

Well, that sounds ambitious, too. We will see how far we can go. Hope you will love it.

By the way, since I don’t know which is the best practice, any comments or advice are welcome.