Now that I have your attention...

Like many of you, given the mercurial nature of change in JS development, I often find myself using seed projects and hello world guides to understand a new concept. This is all well and good to get one up to speed quickly on a topic, but there are downsides to it. I find that I tend to fall into the jack-of-all-trades but master-of-none syndrome.

I guess it's partly a product of the quick changing, always on information age we live in. We need to know things quickly. We want to learn them easily. We don't create enough time in our lives for ourselves so hurry up goddamn it! Besides, I can watch like 100 YouTube vids on the intricacies on how to perform open heart surgery so I'm pretty sure I can do it and anything else I set my mind to. 

I do the same thing with my home-brewing. (Yup, that's the beer part). We built a kick ass brew system.

It's got Raspberry Pi automation built in, temperature controlled fermentation, and enough SS bling to make your eyes burn! When we first fired it up, we set out to brew every beer under the sun. Wits, Weizens, Tripels, IPAs, DIPAs, Reds, Saisons, and a half dozen types of Stout. And for the most part, they all sucked. But why? All we had to do was use the latest clone recipe for Pliney the Elder and as Sam's your uncle, we're awesome brewers!

Eventually, reality sets in. What's going wrong? Why are only some of these brews good and others taste like crap? You start to accept the fact that brewing, like many endeavors, is part art, part science, and a whole lot of practice. You realize that the path to understanding the basics can't be short-circuited. You need to pay your dues. You need to practice. You need to understand the basics. Once you've begun to master some of those, things get better and your confidence goes up. We adopted a more realistic goal. Don't try to brew everything. Learn to brew one thing and be able to repeat it. If you can taste this month's Heady clone and it tastes like last month's Heady clone, then you're on your way.

I'm starting a series of posts that will follow that principle applied to learning how to build applications. Initially, it will be based around the basics of getting started with the latest Angular release. I hope we all can learn something along the way and maybe brew better beer.

First up, Adding Bootstrap to a Simple App.