Introduction to web and mobile development for startup founders

Oct 11, 2012

Will Little

Introduction to web and mobile development for startup founders

[Last Updated: July 5, 2016]

This series of tutorials is a fast-paced, step-by-step, get-to-the-point introduction to building, deploying, and scaling software applications for desktop and mobile devices.

[Author's note: I wrote the first couple dozen tutorials in this series a few years ago and I'm in the process of updating the content to reflect what I believe is a rock-solid way forward for startup founders in today's environment. Please comment if you see anything I missed that should be updated. Thanks!]

The goal here — in parallel with my book on “idea-to-funding” startup operations — is to quickly get you up to speed so you can build Minimum Viable Products for your own ideas.

For those of you who are learning how to code and want to land a job as a web and/or mobile developer someday, this is also a great place to start. You should build as many different kinds of applications as possible.

Either way, you should work on ideating your own venture while working through this tutorial series (surely you have an app or website idea you'd like to build?). This way you will, by far, learn the most from this series.

I'd recommend using the “idea-to-funding” platform over at Startup Rocket to stay organized and land co-founders/advisors as you go.

Part 1 focuses on web development. I'll introduce you quickly to HTML, CSS, SASS, JavaScript (JS), jQuery, Ruby, Embedded Ruby, Ruby on Rails, Git, React, JSON, and front-end development (the updates from Backbone/Eco to Redux/React are in process) — discuss briefly high-level design and business aspects of web and mobile app development — then jump right into writing code.

Specifically, we'll be building together, step-by-step, a simple app to help make meetings more efficient. Libraries and frameworks change quickly, so I'll be updating as I go.

Part 2 extends Part 1 by focusing on building the mobile experience of our app for iOS and Android devices with React Native, including releasing it on the App Store and Google Play.

Part 3 finishes the trilogy by walking through deploying, caching, benchmarking, scaling, releasing new features, and overall DevOps considerations for the app to support thousands-to-millions of users.

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[I'll add links below as I post new content to keep this page updated.]

PART 1

Author's note: as I mentioned above, feel free to subscribe to my newsletter and I'll let you know when new articles are posted. Thanks!

Topics: Startups Software Development

Introduction to web and mobile development for startup founders

TABLE OF CONTENTS

PART 1