I've thrown some concepts at you now and, although they are at the beginner-level (nothing is truly "beginner" when using React), we need to discuss some resources that you can use to further your learning, host your applications, download resources, and just be a generally cool person.

We'll get back into React-specific content in my next post. Promise.

I hope you find this list useful and it helps you the way it helped me. I'll try to regularly update this as I move along.

I won't mention any of the obvious ones (obvious to me at least) like StackOverflow, etc. They are large enough that you'll stumble across them one day.

Here we go.

💽 Hosting 💽

So you have a project and you want to host it. Here are some of the free providers I like to use and their purpose:

• Heroku - Continuous deployment with their own CLI
• Vercel - Continuous deployment and Git integrations
• Netlify - Integrated with many common frameworks and libraries - easy-to-use
• GitHub Pages - Good for static web-pages
• AWS Lambda - Free tier available
• Firebase - Backend hosting with easy-to-integrate authentication offerings
• Atlas - MongoDB hosting from the creators of MongoDB
• Back4App - Relational and NoSQL hosting provider

📖 Learner Resources 📖

I'll be the next person to share my selection of the millions of resources available. A simple Google search will help find a lot of them but there are some sneaky resources here that will hopefully help you reach that next level.

• FreeCodeCamp - One of the best resources available. Sign up for the newsletter, complete the courses, and share your achievements.
• GameDev Academy - Hosted by Zenva, a good website for resources on game development in all forms.
• /r/LearnProgramming - Reddit has a lot of places you can post and dig but this subreddit allows you to get answers to many of the questions you'll have when starting.
• CodeChef - Learning, challenges, and more.
• CodeSchool - Now on Pluralsight, this is a free trial only but provides a lot of interactivity in many of the common coding aspects.
• SoloLearn - Originally a phone app, SoloLearn offers many language courses, a scoring system so you can challenge others, project sharing, and a development sandbox.
• Learning GitHub - Learn git quickly with this plethora of resources.

💻 VSCode Extensions 💻

I use VSCode for many of my projects and there are some very useful extensions available. Some of the very popular ones like Live Server & Quokka you will find on your own. These are some of the more "obscure" ones.

• Git Lens - See changes made to code in-line and more!
• Bracket Pair Colorizer 2 - Makes it easier to identify the start and end brackets in your code.
• TODO Highlight - Highlights TODO & FIXME items in your code.
• Regex Preview - Displays the results of your regex.
• Open in Browser - Allows you to open your project in browser with a couple of buttons.

🖼️ Templates, Libraries, Tools, etc. 🖼️

Templates for applications that can be used to kickstart a project.

• Bit.dev - A cloud library to create, use, and store components rather than hosting them all locally.
• JSON Lint - Tidies up JSON.
• Trello - Track your progress and share with others.
• Color Templates - Generate color templates. I'm horrible at this but now I look great thanks to this website.
• React Templates - A collection of React templates that can be used to find even more templates.

🏧 Challenges/Extras 🏧

Some extra resources for coding challenges, updates, and more.

• Codewars - Specifically, these 99 problems are great coding challenges. Codewars is useful in general.
• HackerRank - Provides coding challenges, annoying email reminders, and a job board. They offer free certifications and an awesome environment.
• NetflixTechBlog - For advanced developers, this blog highlights some of the new changes at Netflix.
• Five Difficult Challenges - Five tough challenges for beginners.
• Gatsby.js Twitch - Gatsby.js's twitch channel that streams pretty cool stuff.

💯 Tips 💯

Free of charge:

• Work on something you're passionate about. Yes, go through the process and create a To-Do app but then try to make a small project you'd like.
• Unless you're a savant, this takes time. There are coding boot camps available and tons of resources that I haven't listed. These resources may not address your needs, but they will help you being to identify them.
• Never stop learning. The development space is one that is always changing. None of the technologies I mentioned were even thoughts 10+ years ago.
• Start now. It's easy to push this off and continue to do so until the thing you wanted to learn isn't even prevalent anymore. The faster you learn this stuff and apply it, the easier it is to learn the next big thing.
• Find a mentor. Everyone always says this. It's really hard to find a mentor when you're stuck at home because of COVID, don't work in the field, don't have money to take a boot camp, etc. If you need help, reach out to me, or someone like me, and we'd be more than happy to help. 😀
• Stay positive. You're going to run into a lot of errors, make tons of mistakes, and find a problem that no one else in the world has had. Keep pushing forward and you'll see it isn't so bad (and someone else has already had that error).

Bonus

• Here's a list of some honorable/non-free resources:
• Codecademy
• Udemy
• Coursera
• Educative.io
• JavaScript 30
• SQL Zoo
• Command Line Basics
• Grid Garden
• I didn't mention these: Hugo, Next, Jekyll, Gatsby, Create React App. You should take the time to explore each of those to learn how to deploy apps quickly.

I hope this helps!

Until next week, when I get back to React ~💠Aaron💠