Howdy. I'm Zach Moffett. I live in North Texas. I work in tech. I grew up around farm and ranch life, and I am not a cattleman. I'm a dad who writes software and thinks ag kids get left out of the coding pipeline.
Howdy World is a free resource. No paywall. You learn by building tools that would actually make sense on a ranch, a farm, or a homestead — not a fake shopping cart.
What we build
One project: a Ranch Record Card for a made-up place called Howdy World Ranch. The example herd is inspired by the Fort Worth Stockyards longhorns — Black Gold, Brutus, McCree, and Blacksmith — because a lot of Texans already know those names. Teaching data only.
The five layers
- HTML — the pens and the paper (structure)
- CSS — paint the bulletin board (look)
- JavaScript — let the page do the math (behavior)
- JSON — the herd as data (shape)
- fetch — pull that data in automatically
Same page the whole time. We just add a layer. Videos will match these pages when they are filmed. Until then, walk the text. Type the code when you can. Copy-paste if you are stuck, then type it once anyway so it sticks.
A text editor and a browser are enough. Make a folder called ranch-record. That is your shop.