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Welcome to the Web Dev Path wiki!

Here we're documenting things we find important to our project in a way that anyone who decides to join us can start collaborating more independently.

Before getting started and cloning the project locally, let's learn why the project was created and how it intends to help junior developers to feel more confident by learning how to work collaboratively in an Open Source program developed for newbies in the dev world.

The Web Dev Path project was idealized in 2020 in consequence of many conversations with aspirant web developers as well as by considering some personal experiences. When talking to other junior developers, it was evident the lack of practical experience with version control in a team dynamic was making their integration in a professional environment harder. Most of those new graduates used a version control feature, such as GitHub or Bitbucket, as a repository for their personal projects where they were the only participants. So, all that “branch out and PR review” enriching process was completely unknown to them. That happened to be a problem either for being considered for “junior” positions and after being hired because, in most cases, their team lead was a very, very busy senior developer…

Another problem found out is that collaborating with open-source projects, the way it is possible to gain some version control experience, can be quite intimidating since there isn’t a clear mentoring aspect. It can take years for someone to develop “a logic mindset” that allows solving a problem by using a programming language, so just going to an open-source project with a list of available tasks that don’t make any sense won’t cut it.

Therefore, the project's main goals are:

• Providing a safe space for juniors to learn how to communicate in a simulated professional environment.

• Offer more detailed tasks (Issues) to help create the logic mindset in a structured project and guidance during the feature development, which is done by following the most common market good practices, such as, always branching out and submitting your solution through a well-documented Pull Request (PR)

To do so, we’re coding a platform in Next.js. In the short term, we intend to have a blog where the participants can post anything related to the web development world. The ultimate purpose tough is to make this platform a portal where Non-Profit Organizations can find support for their web products. That way, new graduates can gain some experience while helping a good cause.