When I created this website, I had a goal to upload weekly blogs on topics I find interesting and share my opinion on them. A lot has transpired since then and obviously, I have not been able to upload anything onto this website for quite a while now. With that being said, I hope this post marks a new “phase” for this website. Hopefully, this phase entails a lot of blogs, tutorials, and other editorials.
Okay. Enough of this accountability drama. Let’s start with why this post exists.
As I finished my Masters’s program and get ready to embark on my professional journey as a Full-Time Software Developer, it quickly dawned on me that this was probably my last experience of being an academic student. This doesn’t mean I won’t ever consider another degree but at least for the foreseeable future, I will not be attending any academic institute. What does this mean for me? Do I stop learning? Well, the short answer is NO. I could bore you with the long answer of how knowledge increases by sharing and blah blah blah but you get my point right? The goal of this tutorial series is to push me to learn new things continuously and keep up with the latest trends all the while creating a basic tutorial series to help beginners. The idea is to create a step-by-step guide that is very easy to follow and recreate. Does this mean I am an expert in this field? HELL NO! But I do feel that I have gained enough experience to write a basic tutorial series to help you get started in your journey of building and deploying apps! Enough of this now. Let’s get to the meat of it.
Starting out in computer science is not easy. Sometimes the abundance of resources creates a huge problem. Many times, people keep watching hours and hours of tutorials online only to forget everything they have learned within a few months. I have fallen into that rabbit hole many times and wasted a lot of time. According to my experience, the best way to learn anything is to actually implement code, build projects and deploy apps. In that way you can get into the meat of things and learn more rather than just staring at the screen for hours and watching someone write a code which you will never implement. With that out of the way, I do want to make it clear that although the title says this series will be for beginners, but I am gonna lay down some basic pre-requisites which are really important for following the series the way it is intended.
This tutorial series is for any person who:
- Has a basic idea about cloud services.
- Is at least a beginner in any of the object-oriented programming languages.
- Is proficient in using Bash and Github.
- Is capable of reading official package documentation for download and installation.
What all will you need to setup beforehand?
- A Github account. You can set it up here.
- A free-tier AWS Account. You can set it up here.
- A workbench with the latest version of Python and Git installed. You can skip the installation of Git if the operating system of your choice is Linux.
- A code editor of your choice. I personally prefer Visual Studio code and you can find it here.
Voila! It’s done. But this is just a teaser. A Hello World post. Hopefully, every week from now on, I shall be able to churn a new tutorial that helps someone to start building and deploying apps. The first tutorial will be on “How to build and deploy a basic Flask app on AWS using virtual environment”.
I would love to see comments on suggestions from readers on what topic they would like me to cover. Do share this and all the future posts if you like what you are reading. Always open to new ideas in the comment section below.
With all that said and done, I want to end this post with a great quote from Lex Fridman:
“You can never say you are an expert in anything because being an expert requires humility.”