Write it up
The write-up is the real assessment. A page you rebuilt proves you can type; explaining your decisions proves you understand them.
Eight hundred to fifteen hundred words, published publicly, your own blog, Medium, Substack, or a well-written README in the repository. Mention webdevopen.com somewhere so other people can find their way here.
Cover five things. What you rebuilt and why you chose it. Three specific differences between your version and the generated one, with a judgement on each. The numbers, in a table, with the method stated, anyone can claim their version is faster. The thing that surprised you most in this phase. And the checklist you wrote in "Read the diff", in full, because that is the part other people will actually use.
Two rules for the writing. Every claim gets a number or an example: not "semantic HTML is better for accessibility" but "the generated version had four buttons with no accessible name; a screen reader announced all four as ‘button’". And include something that did not work, a thing you got wrong, a fix that made it worse, a measurement that contradicted what you expected. Write-ups without failures read as marketing, and the ones with failures are the ones people trust.
Then post it where developers are, and reply to anyone who responds. Building in public is not self-promotion at this stage, it is how you find out whether your explanations survive contact with someone who knows more than you, which is a faster way to improve than any amount of additional reading.
You should now be able to
- Explain technical decisions in writing to another developer
- Support a claim with a measurement rather than an assertion
- Publish something that is useful to someone other than you
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