I’m learning again, not from scratch

And then I realised how long ago I had started making web pages – I made my first website in html on free hosting back in school. And it was… my school 😀 Yeah, come to think of it, back in the ’90s schools didn’t have their own websites. In uni I mastered all sorts of CMS like WordPress and Joomla and became a webmaster on flash in Dreamweaver. At that time Russian Bear and I were into websites, freelancing and even wanted to open our own agency. That was about 15 years ago.

But then I became a YouTube star, so you know the rest :)) We were happily living on passive income until monetisation was cut off for everyone due to geopolitical turmoil. Making a game is a bear’s dream, and also… it’s a cool independent project and a way to grow and diversify your passive income, as monetising games is somewhat similar to monetising blogs.

Although Bear has been doing web projects all along, even after we started running youtube channels. I haven’t done websites myself for a very long time, and I was only thinking about learning how to create apps after a programming course. And now I have realised that modern websites and apps are created in much the same way. And the main idea here is the grid (which blocks make up the design) and responsiveness (keeping the design consistent for different screen sizes).

Bear has been developing a computer game for a few months now and I am going to make a website and a mobile app for it. To take design development, I’m researching how people do the front-end of websites and mobile apps in today’s world, what the most relevant tools and approaches are. And guess what? It’s good to know that at least html/css hasn’t changed much over the years. What remains to be understood is how to make it responsive (for different screen sizes), because in old days any website scales itself as it turns out.

I’m currently researching and testing:

• Figma
• CSS Grid
• Bootstrap

Apparently we’ll need javascript as well 🙄 What I’m about to do is called smart front-end engineering or just web application development.

The idea is that Bear does the backend (the game logic on the server), we came up with and drew a design for it (it’s pretty minimalistic) and now we need to translate the picture into a working website and mobile app. There are even buttons like “export” from Figma or other similar services to unload html/css from image. But this doesn’t seem to work that easy. So you have to “mount” it manually.

It feels strange, like I’m back in my school days, but instead of an old computer I have a new laptop, instead of flash – javascript and new html/css features, instead of a computer-only website – thinking about mobile users too. I’m learning all over again, well not from scratch. The advantage of swimming in the same areas all your life is that you can “catch up” quicker if you already have the foundation.