About

Laura White, Founder

Laura WhiteWelcome! If you’ve been struggling to learn computer programming or web development, you’ve come to the right place. I started this website specifically to provide guidance to those who are new to web development and encouragement to those who are stuck.

My path to becoming a proficient web developer was a long and arduous one. It started with my enrolling in an expensive bootcamp, only to fail to learn from the instructors. The program was new and hadn’t been properly beta tested with novice programmers, so I struggled to keep up and ended up dropping out. I still wanted to learn web development and taught myself from various books and courses. I have found that finding the right book or course is an absolutely essential first step in learning any programming language.

I eventually learned enough to take on a role as a multimedia specialist. While there are several components to my job, web development is one of my most important responsibilities. In October, 2017, I completed the website migration for the Diederich College of Communication at Marquette University. Prior to the migration, I was building webpages and writing server-side code in PHP.

My Current Role

I now manage the creative team for the Diederich College of Communication. In addition to overseeing the creative content, I am the writer, project manager, and web developer on all projects. It’s a big job, but I absolutely love it! Web development is a daily part of my responsibilities, and getting to work with other IT professionals at the university is one of my joys. I also enjoy helping aspiring web developers get to where they want to be. I maintain an active Quora feed where I answer questions on web development (primarily on JavaScript) and provide encouragement to those who are struggling.

Be sure to visit me there and to check out my recommendations for courses and books that have helped me succeed. I wish you great success in your programming journey, and please feel free to contact me if there is anything I can do to help you.

Sidharth Ramanan, Contributor

Sidharth RamananHi! My name is Sidharth Ramanan, and I’m a Computer Science freshman at UCLA.
I’ve been working with web and mobile app technologies for a couple of years, and I’m super motivated about building sophisticated and meaningful applications. I’m familiar with web technologies like HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Angular, React, and Vue, and I’ve done extensive mobile app development with Ionic and React Native. I’ve also written server side code using Node.JS, MongoDB, and Express.
Some of my projects include a mobile app platform I created called Donate Now to support NGOs in India with donations, and a Progressive Web App I built called Panda Escape (designed for mobile phones), which is an Ionic based game I created for a hackathon.
I’m also active on Quora, where I love reading about Math, Technology, Programming, and various other topics, along with networking with people. If you’re up for a nice intellectual discussion or are interested in working with me or hiring me for a project, please feel free to drop me a message!

4 Comments

  1. Hi Laura

    Nice to meet you.
    Thank you for this great, informative and interesting article.
    Lovely photo too.
    It is clear to see that your website can be helpful to all who have access to it.
    What is PHP?
    Best wishes.

    Delroy M

    1. Thanks, Delroy. PHP is a server-side scripting language. PHP is commonly used for tasks like collecting form data and sending it back to the server, modifying data in a database, and sending and receiving cookies. Like JavaScript, you can use PHP to create content dynamically. PHP is part of the LAMP stack, which includes the Linux operating system, Apache web server, the mySQL database and PHP programming language. There is a good article at w3schools if you’d like to learn a little more: https://www.w3schools.com/Php/php_intro.asp

    1. Yes, it’s a good all-purpose language for back-end web development. This means that PHP works behind the scenes. HTML, CSS, and JavaScript are responsible for all the things you “see” on the web, but as I’m sure you can imagine, there’s a lot that goes on beneath the surface. This is where PHP comes in. If you want to send data to a database through the web, for example, PHP can do that.

      If you have any other questions or need a recommendation for a book or course on PHP, please feel free to reach out.

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