The problem is that, without an adequate foundation, he's jumping into frameworks and web development, where you have lots of interacting parts, all of which mu

The problem is that, without an adequate foundation, he's jumping into frameworks and web development, where you have lots of interacting parts, all of which must be understood. He's jumping directly from toy examples for someone learning a language to "industrial scale" development of e.g. full-blown web applications. My suggestion would be to try to come up with a project which stays within the bounds of a single technology and doesn't require frameworks. This will probably mean something that's not web-based.