IF you’re a BEGINNER.. here’s how to take what you already know to a next level.

Go to Codecanyon:

Head over to https://codecanyon.net.

Codecanyon is a popular site where people sell their scripts/themes/web products. It’s a great place to see what sort of things people have built. You can use other similar sites too.

Find something interesting:

Find a theme or script that seems interesting and easy enough. For example “laravel person portfolio/resume script” or anything for that matter.. just make sure it’s something that interests you and it’s not too intimidating..

For example, if I’m not into Finance I wouldn’t even think about Accounting application.

Go ahead and find something and move to the next step.

Understand the product:

Understanding what you picked means wrapping your head around its purpose and how it could be working (don’t worry if you cannot figure out how it works).

Each script on Codecanyon has a preview link. Click it, play around until you are familiar with it.

Ps. I’d save the link somewhere. You’ll be going back it.

Planning out:

Now that you’ve understood the project and you know exactly what it’s doing it’s time to do some planning.. (you’ll never know everything though!)

Open notepad/sublime text or grab a piece of paper.

Title it whatever the project name is, ex “Portfolio site script” and list everything that the site should do. Step by step, bit by bit, write down all the site is doing..

Obviously use the link to the project we saved in earlier step. We’re going to create exact same site. Once you have the list move on to the next step..

Starting the work:

Put 2 full hours aside daily and start writing the code.

If your list starts with something like, “Create a functionality to upload CV” start writing the code for it.

Go through items in your list one by one.

This is the hardest step so if it does seem boring or irritating or you feel like you’re stuck know that it’s totally normal.

This resembles real world web development, you have nowhere to run. You got to face the problem and write the working code. That’s all.

When you’re STUCK:

If you’re completely stuck you’ll feel to give up.

This is normal especially if you want to feel what real work feels like. You HAVE to make sure you put 2 hours in as mentioned in previous step. (Just like how you’d be stuck at your job for 8 hours).

You can take a break until next day AFTER that. What you don’t want to do is get frustrated in first hour and stop!

If it’s been couple days and you still haven’t made progress then you can either ask people on stackoverflow/reddit or such forms or stop working on that section/part of the site…

But carry on working on the next item in the list.. This is important. we don’t give up on entire project just because ONE thing is difficult.

Sometimes you’ll be in such a bad spot where even the next item will seem really, really difficult.

You won’t be able to find a solution or write any amount of useful code.

IF this happens then start the process over, go back to Codecanyon and pick an easier project.

If you follow these steps seriously then each project you complete or even partially complete will teach you so much more than any tutorial.

This will also help you build your portfolio that you can actually talk about.

More tips:

If you get to a point where you want to take the learning to the next level then just buy the script. It will give you exposure to how the internals are actually working and if you’re stuck you can always look at the code.

Needless to say there’s plenty of open source projects you can apply the same technique to.

Goodluck!

You can also follow me on twitter! https://twitter.com/samifromsupreme