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Show HN: Improve your front end skills by practicing on real design templates (codewell.cc)
189 points by moemin 1871 days ago
5 comments

Hi HN!

I'm a designer who's been learning to code for a while now (far longer than I'd love to admit) and one of my biggest issues was trying to find something to code.

I would usually design something and then code it, but that took too much time. So I made Codewell! Let me know your thoughts on this project and why you think this could or couldn't be helpful for beginners!

On the subscription page in the description of the plans when you say "Access to source files" I feel it would make sense to say "Access to Figma source files" instead, otherwise people might get a wrong idea.
Do you mean that people could mistake source files with the assets inside?
Without your clarification, I and other might mentally parse "Access to source files" => "Access to source [code] files".
Agreed.

When I searched for an answer to "What do I get with a subscription?"

It was "oh source code files."

Thanks! This is really helpful, will be sure to update it asap.
Hey man; really love the project. I’ve frequently wanted something like this. Will probably look at this when mentoring fresh frontend devs. Great work!
Makes my heart beat just a little faster knowing that this will be used to teach fresh devs! Really appreciate the kind words!
Congrats on shipping!

Also, I really like the fact that you've thought of this as a SAAS service. Must have been quite a bit of work.

All the best.

Thank you! Appreciate the kind words!
This looks great, well done! Out of curiosity,are you having lots of traction with this project?
Thanks, really appreciate it!

Codewell's definitely growing, we have over 600+ registered users, some really supportive paying members, 60+ users on our Slack channel, and people are already posting some really good solutions on Codewell.

I would say yes! We're really looking forward to reaching more developers and helping them in their journey.

similar, free but less guidance: https://www.frontendpractice.com/
Congrats on launching. But how is this different from frontendmentor?

I have some feedback. Given that other sites are giving exact same service, this is not of much use to me. However, what I need is step by step instructions on how to accomplish a given template. I do not need finished code. I need instructions on how to build each component, styling of each header, each "card", how to use bootstrap rows and make sure nothing over flow, make sure images are not clipped inside grid layout etc. There are individual tutorials for each part but it has become hard to find tuorials for entire project.

Some youtube videos come close but since they are made by experts, its never clear what can go wrong and how one should reason about it.

I guess I want annotated solutions and not finished solutions. I gave same feedback for other sites, but they agreed its needed but didnt do anything about it.

One very important skill as a developer, doesn't matter if Frontend or Backend, is to be able to find solutions when you run into problems or hickups.

Nobody can cover all those things, since they are very much individual problems. You can usually find other people that ran into the same or a similar problem by using search engines or something like stack overflow.

An experienced developer will be able to guess what the problem might be and attempt several things to fix it. This knowledge is not really teachable by following a course or youtube video. It's acquired through working with technologies and learning the ins and outs of those.

Thanks for the congrats! :)

Great question — the main selling point for Codewell is the quality of the templates. Free or paid, the templates will be made by experienced designers, so people can expect high quality templates.

Think full-fledged projects (i.e. a template with a landing page, onboarding experience, dashboard, etc).

There's so much we have in mind that we want to implement in Codewell to make beginner developer's lives easier, but this is just the start and we're continuously looking for feedback to help us achieve that.

All in all, though, we don't see it as a bad thing that there are similar services out there, in fact, the more, the better for beginner devs!

Great, well done. Brilliant idea and execution is top notch! Followed you on twitter to get updates.
Thanks a lot, really appreciate it! Looking forward to seeing you on Twitter and Codewell :)
This is absolutely brilliant.
Thank you!