Dear senior front-end developers,
You've been in the industry for a while, and you've gained a lot of experience and knowledge along the way. What advice would you give to junior developers who are just starting out? How can they improve their skills and become better developers? What are some common mistakes you see junior developers make, and how can they avoid them?
Share your thoughts and insights to help the next generation of front-end developers succeed.
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Latest comments (44)
My key advice would be: Accessibility is important. Learn a bit about peoples disabilities and how it can affect their web usage. There are a lot of great resources out there to then help understand how to tackle these problems.
If you're a front-end dev, you have to know about this, it's as important as any other aspect of front-end dev work you will face in your career.
My two pieces of advice would be: a) don't get complacent - keep learning new things and challenging yourself (trust me, I've made that mistake and paid the price for it) ; b) find a mentor with more experience than you - either where you work or someone online whom you can trust, and do frequent code reviews with them (your code and theirs).
6 years experience, 3 at my current position. So not necessarily senior, but I've done some things. My biggest thing, especially now in a TypeScript world, is to learn vanilla JavaScript. I've done a number of interviews where candidates knew TypeScript features or their framework of choice (we do Angular), but didn't know what the primitive types were, didn't know how to describe a closure, whether or not JS is pass by value or pass by reference, apply vs call vs bind, etc. Everything gets compiled down to JavaScript, so you need to know how vanilla works since that's what's actually working in the browser.
Keep balance between work and life. Try tailwind with simple HTML without any JS. Try JS without any DOM manipulation. Try different languages on codewars. Do some side project for fun.
My best advice to any developer of any level: learn how to learn. If you pursue a career in software development you will constantly be asked to learn new technologies. Even if you work in a maintenance role you'll need to learn how to read code from multiple developers--no small task.
As developers, we're expected to simply pick up new and complex technologies without missing a beat. I've recently been reviewing an online course on OAuth and I'm shocked about how little I knew on the subject which I was being asked to work with.
Learn how to learn--it will serve you well in your whole career.
I recommend never ever stop refining your knowledge in fundamentals (E.g clean code, design patterns, refactoring, JavaScript, CSS, HTML). Enjoy the ride and don't get nervous trying to learn the greatest and latest version of every single framework/library that is released every single day please! Also make sure you start working in your soft skills (communication, team working) and time management. One great lesson I had from a previous manager was to develop my own project management system, whether in a super sophisticated online tool or a plain piece of paper. The key is to refine it until it's aligned with your own preferences and make you effective on your daily work
Saying this based on my 9+ years of work, both on frontend and backend, may not be agreed by everyone :)
Happy coding!!
Do side projects! Even if it amounts to nothing, programming outside of work gave me the most valuable knowledge.
Probably already mentioned but I'll focus on the job world.
I'd say to keep positive about failing a job interview or not being selected for a job simply. It's not your technical skills that are bad most of the time, it's just that they look for specific profile for a job. Even if it feels negative, just take it as a good learning opportunity.