whether you'd rather start with front-end or back-end is up to you, and if you'd like to try on front-end development I'd be happy to give a few pointers on what are good places to start at
Thanks! I've been looking into react, redux, and semantic-ui lately, but I'd welcome any advice you have. UI is my weak point. I can take an HTML/CSS theme and tweak and rearrange it, but as far as making something that looks good from scratch, I'm a fish out of water.
Ah I see then, we'll I imagine you'll be interested in taking a look at this roadmap. It lists down the many paths and essential knowledge to have along the way.
When it comes to front-end I would pay special attention to the following items:
HTML/CSS: The bread and butter of front-end, it's good to know how a page gets rendered and how can you use CSS (flexbox or grid layouts) to get the page to behave the way you'd want it to.
Package Managers: Be it NPM or Yarn, when you're working with Javascript frameworks, chances are you'll be importing libraries to help accomplish a variety of things. It's good to know how to apply these dependencies into your project and make sure their respective versions aren't in conflict with one-another
Git: I'm not sure if you've gotten to work with it, but git is really essential to gain control over your code's versions, be it separating features and testing them in individual branches, or being able to roll back to an earlier version if you've done anything problematic
Build Tools: These are being able to create a build for your production environment, the most widely used tool I know for this is Webpack, but you have other options too (as seen in the link above)
On a side note, React/Redux is great! I've been working with it for a little over a year and there's always been plenty to learn. If you're curious about how a bigger project running on React looks like, I'd recommend taking a look at the Mattermost project. It's pretty complex but well established when it comes to all the points I mentioned above and more! (like unit testing with Jest/Enzyme)
I use Git for most stuff. It's pretty nice. Bisect has come in handy a couple times.
I've been using NPM a bit, as it seems to be the preferred package manager for installing any given JavaScript library. I haven't really looked into how it works in depth, but I will have to at some point. I will check out the other things you mentioned as well.
As far as HTML and CSS go, I know pretty much how they work and have used them in the past, though I need to update my knowledge a bit. But as far as starting from a blank page and making something that actually looks good, do you just have to know all the different properties by heart? Do you usually start from a design made in photoshop or something similar?
Hmm, Well I wouldn't say you need to know things by heart, but getting acquainted with your options and their capabilities, then looking them up when you need them specifically is plenty (e.g. Knowing you can use CSS animations to rotate an element on hover, and then referencing w3schools.com for the specifics).
And for how to start working on a page. In a professional setting we have our UI/UX folks who'll decide how things should look like and hand us a photoshop file + additional resources we need (like logos, icons, etc). But when I'm working on a personal project, I start by sketching out a wireframe (I personally recommend Realtimeboard for that), and once my entire layout is looking goods I'll look around other websites for inspiration on specific styles (or if i'm feeling lazy I'll use a pre-made library like Bootstrap or MaterialUI).
I feel like this could change depending on each person though, so take all my advice with a grain of salt
Thanks! I've been looking into react, redux, and semantic-ui lately, but I'd welcome any advice you have. UI is my weak point. I can take an HTML/CSS theme and tweak and rearrange it, but as far as making something that looks good from scratch, I'm a fish out of water.
Ah I see then, we'll I imagine you'll be interested in taking a look at this roadmap. It lists down the many paths and essential knowledge to have along the way.
When it comes to front-end I would pay special attention to the following items:
On a side note, React/Redux is great! I've been working with it for a little over a year and there's always been plenty to learn. If you're curious about how a bigger project running on React looks like, I'd recommend taking a look at the Mattermost project. It's pretty complex but well established when it comes to all the points I mentioned above and more! (like unit testing with Jest/Enzyme)
I use Git for most stuff. It's pretty nice. Bisect has come in handy a couple times.
I've been using NPM a bit, as it seems to be the preferred package manager for installing any given JavaScript library. I haven't really looked into how it works in depth, but I will have to at some point. I will check out the other things you mentioned as well.
As far as HTML and CSS go, I know pretty much how they work and have used them in the past, though I need to update my knowledge a bit. But as far as starting from a blank page and making something that actually looks good, do you just have to know all the different properties by heart? Do you usually start from a design made in photoshop or something similar?
Hmm, Well I wouldn't say you need to know things by heart, but getting acquainted with your options and their capabilities, then looking them up when you need them specifically is plenty (e.g. Knowing you can use CSS animations to rotate an element on hover, and then referencing w3schools.com for the specifics).
And for how to start working on a page. In a professional setting we have our UI/UX folks who'll decide how things should look like and hand us a photoshop file + additional resources we need (like logos, icons, etc). But when I'm working on a personal project, I start by sketching out a wireframe (I personally recommend Realtimeboard for that), and once my entire layout is looking goods I'll look around other websites for inspiration on specific styles (or if i'm feeling lazy I'll use a pre-made library like Bootstrap or MaterialUI).
I feel like this could change depending on each person though, so take all my advice with a grain of salt
Thanks for your help, Andre.