Learning to code by doing 4 projects at once.

this product

For a little background, I'm primarily a designer and frontend html/css person these days. I originally majored in computer science (hated it) and switched to design. When I was in computer science I first learned Java, then VB and then finally C#, I was terrible at it but I enjoyed it, just not as much as I enjoyed design.

I have always wanted to try and pick it up again as it's a great skill to have and as I continue building startups it would be nice to be able to build them without relying on a 3rd party developer all the time to do most of the backend.

So, I am going to re-learn how do write code by doing 4 projects all at the same time to push the repetition aspect as much as possible to help it stick in my head.

Two of the projects are actually rebuilds, the first one is my Windows 10 App: Surface Pixel (https://www.surfacepixel.com). I'm going to rebuild this from the ground up as a web app this time, rather than as a native Windows 10 app.

The second project will be rebuilding my domain selling service: Selldom (https://selldom.io). It's bursting at the seams and needs a better foundation for long-term growth. Plus it's the only app written in Python (which I don't know at all).

The third app, is building out: NerdFeedr (http://www.nerdfeedr.com) into a self-managed service rather than a very manual process that I have now. All the profiles are just static content that I manage.

The forth app I can't talk about yet, as it's a "Partnership" project that I'm building with a friend that isn't ready to be made very public, it's related to "Events" though.

Technology
I'm sure many of you are wondering what I plan to build with. Since I have a background with C# and can already read it fairly well and have basic understanding of how to write it, I'm going to continue pushing that skill set.

I already use Visual Studio for everything else, so it fits well with my pipeline and just makes sense. I'm building with the latest DotNet Core hosted on Azure. For the frontend framework I'll be using Bootstrap 4 as I'm very comfortable with that. I know a local developer who is going to mentor me as I go and help me work through the things I get stuck on.

Yes, I know there are a million other "Better" platforms, packages, frameworks, etc. to build with. I'm not interested, many of them are just too far out of my understanding of how things work that C# is more logical to me at this point. A lot of my friends, followers that I have are C# devs so it just fits well for me.

This is a big challenge for me, it will take me quite a while to learn and implement across 4 different apps, but it will be worth it in the long-run.

Wish me luck, and thanks for reading!