Course utility

I’ll be honest, I wasn’t expecting to get many of these updates out over weekends, and I’m fine with that. These days I’m not one to work myself into the ground, I’ve done it in the past and it doesn’t end well. I value time off, I think it’s important.

I was actually away this weekend, in Sussex with family, so I didn’t give work much thought at all. It was nice to switch off and hear what everyone else has been up to for a change.

Now back to it, I spent the morning thinking about how best to structure this course. To get the ball rolling a had a poke around in some of the courses I’ve taken recently.

I like the way Andy gets right to it in Learn Eleventy from Scratch, he doesn’t over do it with the theory – it’s straight into the code. I’d like to do something similar. If past experience has taught me anything it’s that the best way to learn is to get in with the weeds and start building things as soon as you can. It’s easier to stay focused and a lot more fun than wading through pages and pages of endless theory, without ever putting what you learn into practice.

So let’s jump right in with the basics and learn how to spin up a simple website quickly and efficiently, in the fewest lines of code possible. For some of you this may be enough. But Hugo is powerful, so why stop there? For those who want to go beyond the basics, we’ll take it further by adding functionality, exploring all the features Hugo has to offer in the process.

Maybe I’m getting ahead of myself here, but I like the idea of using the course to build a few different projects across a few different modules. These could even be real world side projects – I’ve got a lot of ideas. Either way you learn how to use Hugo in a number of practical ways.

What I like about this idea is that it gives the course utility – you come away a variety of different projects to add to your portfolio. In my mind that can only be a good thing.

From my perspective, splitting the work into a series of small modules is far more manageable. It doesn’t feel quite so overwhelming, both to think about and plan. I can focus on each module one by one, and in time this course may even start building itself.