Just this past week I actually received a chance to interview in two parts with Amazon, and while that experience in and of itself might belong in a different post, you can bet I was running all over hell and high water through the internet to find resources to help me study.

I looked through Google searching everything that any prospective job candidate would. Since I was applying for a web developer position, the bulk of my searches revolved around ‘HTML things all web developers should know’, ‘Javascript things all web developers should know’, and ‘CSS things all web developers should know’. It was essentially a cluster of panicked self-testing. Now, mind you, I got started a week early on this; My recruiter was nice enough to let me know that I should study HTML/CSS/JS as early on as possible and as in-depth as I could.

After so long, taking notes on cardstock started frying my brain, it’s really hard to absorb theory, I don’t think a lot of people would deny that. Some people are just hands-on learners, and I’m sure I fall in that category, so I took to looking for web development problems and decided to make heavy use of JSfiddle, which is, if you’ll ask me, probably one of the greatest inventions known to man. Honestly, whoever invented JSfiddle should be awarded piles of money.

If you’re wondering, JSfiddle is essentially a web development environment where you can simulate code, or rather, a small instance of code. JSfiddles can be used to prove a point, to demonstrate a quirky issue, or just to problem solve in general.

I made sure that as I prepared, I was making a JSfiddle every day, Everything I did was typically done in Javascript, but you can just as easily use it to figure out some of the ins and outs of (equally important) HTML and CSS.

JSFiddle is a powerful tool, I’m talking Ivan Drago in Rocky IV powerful, because it offers you the environment you already need to get up and running. No need to wrestle with servers or setting up dummy pages and modifying text files, it’s all there Up in the cloud (ooh, buzzwords).

If you’re looking for a good hands on tool, you can’t go wrong with JSfiddle. You just can’t. It’s so great.

Give it a visit! Make an account! Start fiddling!

Bradley out.