
Show HN: Supercharge your front-end skills by building real projects - stooderrr
https://www.frontendmentor.io/
======
stooderrr
Hey everyone,

I’m a Front-end/JavaScript developer and web development instructor at General
Assembly in London. Over the years I’ve seen lots of students who struggle to
find projects to practice on once they’ve learned the fundamentals of HTML,
CSS, and JavaScript.

So I built Frontend Mentor as a place where people can come to improve their
front-end skills whilst using a real-life workflow. Each challenge provides
mobile & desktop designs, assets, starter code, project brief, and a front-end
style guide. The rest is up to the individual.

All challenges are free and there’s a Slack community if you need any help on
one of the projects.

I’ve literally just launched this last week, so I’d love some feedback if you
can spare the time.

Thanks for taking a look!

------
justboxing
Congrats on shipping! I was looking for something like this...

Is it possible to get feedback on the built-code? Do you have any feature down
the line that will let people submit "solved" challenges and get feedback on
their code from real front end developers?

That way, it would help catch bad coding practices early... or maybe you could
include a standard solution with each challenge, kind of like how PluralSight
courses have a "Before" and "After" folders, with the "After" folder
containing the completed code.

~~~
stooderrr
Thanks!

At the moment anyone who finishes a challenge can post in the Slack community
for others to see and comment on. The next stage will be to build out a web
app where users can submit solutions for others to view and comment on.

The problem with including a solution is that I don't want it to become a
crutch. It would be too easy for people to just look at the solution when they
hit an issue, instead of debugging and asking questions. My aim for the
challenges is for people to learn by using a real-life workflow, so having a
solution available doesn't feed into that.

Perhaps when the web app is up there could be some notion of "Done", at which
point a solution would be made available.

I'm open to ideas on this, because I've been going over it a lot and talking
to users and still not found a good path.

------
lucaslee
I like the idea, and congrats on the launch!

The resource page you put together looks high quality.

One suggestion is to make each challenge focus on one thing, like flexbox (or
even layout in general), font etc. I saw you are giving feedbacks on twitter,
which is awesome. Maybe you could collect all the solutions and your feedbacks
for each challenge, present them nicely on your site, and maybe also highlight
what can be learned from each of them.

~~~
stooderrr
Thanks for the feedback! The next stage will be to build out an actual web app
where users can submit solutions and see each other's work easily and comment.

Now that I've got people doing the challenges, I'm talking to them to see
exactly what they feel would improve the offering. The points you made about
the solutions being visible is a common one already. At the moment people just
post the URL in the Slack community or on Twitter.

Thanks again for your comment!

------
hashim-warren
I like this project. It's hard to find high-quality mockups that are free for
learners like me to use

~~~
stooderrr
Hey Hashim, really happy you like the project. I'm looking forward to seeing
your solutions!

------
gghyslain
Do you plan to monetize it?

~~~
stooderrr
Hey Ghyslain. Yeah, I do plan to monetize it. But I want to keep the
challenges free to download/start for everyone.

The goal is definitely to try to move this towards being a full-time thing, as
opposed to a side project.

------
mandycodestoo
Thanks for your effort. I am tackling the first project right now!

~~~
stooderrr
That's awesome, looking forward to seeing your solution!

