My Lonely and Confusing Journey as a New Roku Developer (And How To Bring Confidence And Clarity To Yours)

The start of my Roku development journey in 2021 was harder than I could have ever expected.

I spent a month and a half banging my head against documentation that didn’t address any of the problems I was having. Simply put, the official tutorials were so basic in complexity that nothing I learned helped me solve any real-world problems. So I didn’t know if the code I was writing was bad because I had no good reference to compare it to.

In those first months, my productivity was very low. Common tasks like debugging problems or getting visuals to pixel perfect quality were taking me twice as long as in my previous job.

Worst of all, the journey was very lonely. Coming from the web dev world and seeing that there were no Youtube tutorials, blog posts, or any recent Stack Overflow questions happening was very discouraging. It felt as if I was working with a dead technology.

Kinda sad for the #1 streaming platform in the US, right?

And then everything changed…

All of this changed when one day I was checking old questions on the official Roku forums and someone linked to a Slack channel for Roku developers. Having tried everything under the sun, what else could I lose by talking to a bunch of strangers on the internet?

To my surprise, joining this Slack was like finding an oasis in the middle of the desert. And I was thirsty to learn as much as I could.

This was a place full of experts who were kindly answering questions for anyone who had them, sharing anecdotes, and being very cool in general.

Over the next four months, I learned everything I was wondering since day 1 (and more) about modern tools, best practices, and what a high-quality project really looks like.

After a while, I even started contributing to some open-source projects like BrighterScript, BSLint, and the Rooibos Testing Framework. Heck, I even got to design and implement our own community web portal.

A brighter future

Now, +3 years into my journey, I continue to meet newcomer developers who join with the same desperation for answers that seem to be nowhere else online. I actively try to help as much as I can by answering questions in #general.

I invite you to join this lovely place. But know that you don’t have to wait for months as I did to learn the basics in a good way, because I’ve compiled my learnings into a free beginner-friendly course that any newbie can complete in five days or less.

Roku 101: A roadmap to create and deploy your first Modern Roku Application

This FREE 11,851-words course will guide you through basic core concepts that took me months to learn on my own when I first started my journey. More importantly, you will also learn the real process of deploying an application.

Five days from now, you will feel comfortable and confident on your path forward as a developer — by developing and publishing your first Modern Roku Application. Here’s what we’re going to cover:

• Day 1: (Step 1) Fundamentals for a Modern Roku Project. We’ll reset your preconceptions of what a Roku project should look like, and you will learn the absolute basics that were never explained to you correctly.

• Day 2: (Step 2) Making your application interactive. We’ll cover how to handle events and key presses to make your app interactive. Plus, a closer look at the nuts & bolts of the BrightScript language.

• Day 3: (Step 3) How to Debug your Application like a Pro. Have you ever been stuck on a bug for 3+ hours? Never again after this lesson. I will explain how to debug your code line-by-line both for logic and for visuals.

• Day 4: (Step 4) Your Biggest Challenge Yet. This is where things get to the next level. You will completely revamp your application to include custom async logic, make HTTP calls, and play video from the data fetched.

• Day 5: (Step 5) Publishing your Modern Roku Application. We’ll wrap this course by learning how to publish your application as a beta channel. This process is more complicated than you might think, but we’ll explain it step by step.

So, what do you say? Are you ready to become a Modern Roku developer — and really understand the nuts & bolts of Roku development?

Fill out this enrollment form to join the course and access the first lesson.