More Bubble tutorials

This might be turning into a useful thread for folks… (Hopefully new folks will learn to search for answers here in the forum, but I know that’s a lot to ask… :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:)…

BTW, OP, @confirmed272 I’m not aiming that comment at you. Your question is a fairly well-formed one and it’s great that you’ve done the lessons. Most posts here, to be quite frank, can be answered by “RTFM (read the freakin’ manual) and also, DTFL (do the freakin’ lessons).”

Anyhoo: I know a lot of people just come here to be spoonfed and ask a question that’s been asked 5000 times, so let me make the following suggestion:

There are awesome tutorials being posted here every day in the form of answers to various users’ questions. If one simply kept up with the forum and read posts of interest for a little while every day, one would learn A TON about common Bubble issues, app development in general, web dev in general, etc. almost via osmosis.

In fact, one of the reasons that I participate here frequently (and thereby became a moderator here) is that reading, thinking about, and often answering questions is a great way to build your Bubble skills.

Many are the times that a question will come up here that one maybe is not facing now, but one anticipates will face in the future. Skimming the best responses is a great way to be prepared for the moment one faces that issue… A lot of times, I’m like, “hmm… I don’t have that issue but this is something I’ve never thought about…” And then, by reading the thread, I pick up ideas that help in the future.

Additionally, there are folks here (some who’ve responded already in this thread) who – pretty much weekly, sometimes daily – drop HUGE FREAKING KNOWLEDGE BOMBS. Unfortunately, there’s not a “follow” type action in Discourse (the software that runs this forum), but simply being on the lookout for replies from the following local experts will teach you a ton. Not coincidentally, some are moderators here:

@dan1, @NigelG, @romanmg, @fayewatson, @andrewgassen, @mebeingken, @sridharan.s, @seanhoots, @mishav, @Kfawcett, @luke2, and others that I’m surely just blanking on regularly drop SUPER HELPFUL info. (Also, me, @keith.) Every one of them has their special areas of knowledge and all of them have their own styles in terms of approaches, solutions, tone, and opinion. (@MattN, who posted above is also very interesting… that very well-organized mega-tutorial of his is pretty dang cool. Hope to see more regular participation from him here.)

Keep an eye out for their posts and replies! (And pay special attention anytime any one of them has a question. The replies and their own follow-up is sure to be helpful.)

There’s no canonical Bubble tutorial, course, or book that will teach you everything. Bubble is just like any other programming framework/language/environment: There are things you cannot build in it, but the array of things you can build in it is still insanely large. Nobody can teach you everything. You have to learn how to learn the things. (Pro tip: most of this just involves using Google properly. Hooray! Googling things is easy.)

When you come to Bubble, the first step is to do the lessons. The second step is just forget all about that “you don’t have to be a coder” bullshit marketing that got you here in the first place. You are now, at a minimum, a web developer. You must learn about the web developer things (you are building a website. after all). You must also learn some computer science. Coding only partly intersects with computer science (“coding” is akin to knowing how to write in a certain language, computer science is akin to understanding grammar and linguistics).

You must also either learn or develop an innate sense (if you do not have it already) of how to do things algorithmicly… how to do things programmatically and repeatably. This is the foundation of “doing things with a computer.”

Visual programming environments like Bubble are just that: visual programming environments. The only good ones (Bubble is one of these) must be supplemented by code or code-like or code-lite extensions to do all of the things that one would want to do. So you’re going to learn some of that.

(Because for better or worse, it has been decided that code – encapsulated in various frameworks – is the best way to do things. And indeed sometimes it is. Visual programming environments lost this battle a long time ago. Visual programming environments are now just another framework – a superior framework, I would argue – for how one might build things. But there aren’t comprehensive visual frameworks for building certain things.

(Bubble is a comprehensive visual framework for building simple to moderately-advanced web applications, but it’s not a good candidate for building a narrowly-focused microservice, for example. But boy does it work great with narrowly-focused microservices designed to solve specific problems. Master Bubble and gain a bit of facility with building microservices in nodejs and there’s A LOT that you can do with that combo.)

But don’t let any of the above deter you: Most folks come here looking to clone very basic web things that are easily done in a few minutes in Bubble. I have no idea why they want to do these things, but they are easy and fun to do in Bubble. I get a kick out of answering questions that people are clearly thrashing on and bashing their heads against the keyboard about in fewer words than I’ve written in this post.

I also get a kick out of seeing folks go from question askers to question answerers to askers-of-advanced-mind-blowing-questions.

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