I'm building EpicWeb.dev

September 7th, 2022 — 7 min read

Futuristic spaceship flying through the sky from night-time blue on the left to streaks of red lines on the right.
Futuristic spaceship flying through the sky from night-time blue on the left to streaks of red lines on the right.
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I want to take everything I know about building web applications and package it up into a consumable form. For years I've envisioned a "KCD.edu" sort of site where I teach the 99% of skills every web developer shares. I've always wanted to help get people from "I want to learn to program" to "I can build and maintain a web application". After building TestingJavaScript.com and EpicReact.dev, I think I'm ready to take this on.

And I'd like to tell you a bit about what I'm thinking for this project and how you can participate in it while I work on it.

I'm about to explain some plans I have in place. It's important that you understand plans are not promises and can (and do) change. But I think it's fun to share my early plans with you, so I'm going to. Just take them with a grain of salt.

First off, if you've not gone through TestingJavaScript or EpicReact, you may not appreciate the level of quality and the amount of content I bring to courses like this. People describe EpicReact.dev as a university-level course. It really should take weeks to get through all that material properly. If you're curious, you can learn more about how I teach in my blog post "How I Teach".

With that in mind, EpicWeb.dev will be at least two times bigger than EpicReact.dev. Better content quality (I'm always working on improving my skills as a teacher) and much more concepts covered. Additionally, our tools have come a long way in the last two years, so I'll be able to help you become capable of more in less time.

I plan on having a lot of different forms of content as a part of EpicWeb.dev. Podcasts, interviews, blog posts, talks, etc. The primary form of material will be exercise-focused workshops. A lot of them. The material will be separated into chunks of what I can teach in a single day of about 6 hours if I were teaching it to you in person (which will be further separated into about 6-9 exercises). Several of the workshops will be linear (recommended to be taken one after the other) while others will be consumable at any point (with the right prerequisites).

Through all the workshops, we're going to be focusing on building an app together. Each workshop will focus on a specific set of learning outcomes which you will achieve by building further on the app in some aspect. When we're finished with the app, you'll have developed the primary skills shared by web developers.

The first thing I need to do is start building the app. Typically how I develop workshop material is I build the finished version first and then remove the necessary bits that are relevant to what you're going to learn. When building something this large, I need to make sure that the finished version is capable of teaching all the required skills you need to learn. So the app itself is quite ambitious. I already have a pretty solid idea of what it will be, but I don't think I'll share that quite yet 😉 Let's just say it'll be Epic 🌌.

Just watching me develop the app from scratch could be quite interesting. This is why I'm planning on live streaming all of my development of the app. Subscribe to my YouTube channel to watch the process unfold. I'll be live streaming a LOT in the coming months as I develop this app. You can also join the Epic Web Community on Discord to chat about the app and provide ideas and feedback.

I also plan on bringing on (and paying) experts to review and provide feedback on different aspects of what I've built. This will be recorded and provided as part of the overall product. I'm really looking forward to that bit.

Clearly, this will take quite a bit of time. Just building the app that we're going to build together will take a lot of effort. And unlike EpicReact.dev, because I want to help you learn how to build the full web application, there will be a backend component to this as well. Additionally, when it's all finished, I want people to be able to approach this with the only pre-requisite being that they can read and type.

On top of that, I don't let people build my content for me. I do sometimes have people help a bit, but for the vast majority of the material, I need to be the one to develop it and practice delivering it before ultimate recording it myself. If I waited to release anything until the whole thing was finished we'd be waiting for quite some time.

So I'm going to be releasing this in chunks. Once the app is finished, I'll start creating the workshops. I'm not 100% certain which set of workshops will be released first, but I can say that I plan on making the "learn to program" workshops will not come first. This is because I need to build this in a way that's sustainable and I don't plan on charging anything for those. I don't like the idea of making money on people's hopes and dreams. I like the idea of making money off your boss buying the course much better.

So the first set of workshops will likely be more advanced, and then I'll work backwards to the more beginner material. This may feel a little odd, but keep in mind that this is all pursuant to the ultimate goal of having a series of workshops that will take you from 0 to 100, so when it's all finished we'll be in a good spot. It'll just take a while to get there.

As usual, I won't actually start recording the workshop videos until after I've actually delivered the workshops a few times. So stay tuned for tickets to those workshops becoming available soon.

I couldn't be more excited about this. I'm bursting with ideas and excitement around it.

If you'd like to keep up-to-date, please sign up here:

I'm really excited to turn you into an EpicWeb.dev 🌌

FAQ

When will this be released?

This is going to be an enormous series of workshops and that will take a lot of time to build. Because of this I'm planning on releasing them in chunks starting with the more advanced material first and working backward to the more beginner material. I'm hoping to release the first chunk sometime mid-to-late 2023. I expect the entire thing to be finished by the end of 2024.

What's the difference between a plan and a promise?

A promise is something you pay for. A plan is something I share with you because I like building in public. Until you've paid for it, consider everything I say to be plans, not promises 😅

How much will it cost?

I don't know yet. I definitely plan for there to be quite a bit of material that is offered for free though, especially the beginner material. I don't want to make money on people's hopes and dreams ⭐

Will you cover "x"?

As explained in the blog post above, I'm building a fullstack, production-scale web app. If a topic is necessary information for that app, then I will cover it. If it's not, then I will not. Part of what people pay for in education are opinions, so I'll not be sharing multiple frameworks or provide options for how to do the same thing.

But this thing is huge and I'll cover a LOT of stuff. When it's finished, I hope that someone with no knowledge of programming will be able to start and successfully complete all the material. So, no pre-requisite technical knowledge required. That's a lot of ground to cover 😅

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Kent C. Dodds
Written by Kent C. Dodds

Kent C. Dodds is a JavaScript software engineer and teacher. Kent's taught hundreds of thousands of people how to make the world a better place with quality software development tools and practices. He lives with his wife and four kids in Utah.

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