Digital: Will Hudson reports back from Steer's week-long coding course

Earlier this month It’s Nice That director Will Hudson went on a week-long coding course with our friends at Steer. Here’s how he got on…

At the beginning of July, as most educational institutions were getting ready for the summer break, I went back to school for the first time in six years. Even though it was only for five days and technically it probably should’t be called school, I had one of the most enjoyable weeks in a long time.

The school in question was Steer, a London based start-up devoted to teaching practical web development – and they’re certainly doing that. Running Monday to Friday, the course I was enrolled on was Front End web development, essentially everything you need to know to get websites looking great (including html, css and Javascript).

The course – led by the excellent Rik Lomas – worked through a number of websites throughout the week, almost all from scratch and all having relevant uses after the week was finished. Although the process initially felt like copying what was written (or in this case typed) on the board, it soon all started to fall into place and within the first few days I felt more than comfortable building html and css, and had a clear understanding as to why certain lines of code (and missing lines of code) resulted in the things they did.

While the course did move on to include Javascript (a dark art if you ask me and something I’m not quite sure my brain was ready for) it reiterated something I’ve felt for a long time; it’s not impossible to learn these skills and there’s a real appetite to do so. Out of the 14 or so fellow pupils I studied with the ages ranged from late teens to early fifties, and reasons for being there included designers who knew their clients were asking for websites they felt as if they should be building, to university lectures wanting to broaden an understanding of web development. There were also the next start-ups, animators and even a dentist – all of who now have a real understanding and ability to build professional looking websites.

If you’ve ever thought building websites is beyond you, then Steer will prove it isn’t.