Academy Library
Academy Tenets

Learning resources from the Prescription Free Academy of Web Development and Software Engineering.

Tenets of Software Engineering

These are tenets that we share with students to guide and assist them on their way to becoming accomplished software engineers.

This is being published as I write it. November, 2024.

It’s Not About How to Code

Of course that’s involved, but the real skill is in learning to craft software that’s reliable, maintainable, robust and coherent.

More coming on this soon.

Sharpen Your Research Skills

Search well. Check your effectiveness. Take a moment to look over the results. Stay away from low quality resources.

Follow links. Sites like MDN have extensive cross referencing. Mostly in the form of contextual links.

Follow them! You don’t need to read the whole thing. Just scan it and read what’s useful. Then go back to where you were and keep going.

Make Use of Learning Resources

MDN Web Docs has great resources. It’s not the only site, but it’s fairly comprehensive and well put together. It’s peer reviewed by hundreds of great folks who really know their stuff and want to produce accurate info for its own sake. Just because it’s needed. No business interests involved.

Get to know their guides. Get to know the format of their resources. Follow through the curriculum or at least review it. Add “mdn” when you’re searching for a reference on any part of HTML, CSS or JavaScript.

When you’re searching for more general info, skip adding “mdn”. There’s a lot of other good info out there too.

See our Courses and Resources for more sites to make use of.

The Real Learning Starts When You Start Work

That’s why we focus our learning initiatives on being as close to a real working environment as it’s useful for them to be.

It’s not just about writing code. That’s probably not even half of it.

Know What You Don’t Know

Jack of All Trades, Master of Most

It’s All About the Experience

For users, at least. It’s a different world. And one that you need to be intimately aware of if you’re designing interfaces and want to do it well.

Modules, Interfaces, Modular Design

Test, Test, Test

Write Clean Code, Master Debugging, Eliminate Frustration

Delay Gratification

Let Go!

It’s not a useful approach to try and get it all right the first time. Your focus is needed elsewhere.

See Educator Portal for further ramblings.