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Discussion on: What Front-End Developer Skills Should You Focus on Leading Into 2020?

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shamyyl profile image
Shamil

Totally disagree.

You forgot the most important part of programmer's skills.

Data structure.

It is much more important then how your code looks, how much technologies you know, how fast you learn another pretty framework.

If you have mess in your data structure, if you don't follow strict principles while develop your data, you eventually find your project as a a big messed mix of monkey patches. And no one can support this project, if you leave it.

Again. Data structure.

The first, the last and the most important thing, you should care about, is how you store your data.

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mattbee_25 profile image
Matt Bee

To be honest I think general problem solving and communication (in code or in person with stakeholders) is as important as data structures. You can pick up data structures as you learn, I did and am doing OK.

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ironhelixx profile image
Jesse R Davis • Edited

"Soft Skills" are very important, indeed - it can make you more marketable and a much better team mate to work with.

Data Structures and Algorithms are something that can be learned on a need-to-know basis. Most Web Developers - especially front-end devs, which this article was targeted at (new ones at that) - can go an entire, successful, career without knowing anything in-depth about them, frankly. So I don't think they are "foundational knowledge" points that should gate-keep people out of the developer space.

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1marc profile image
Marc Grabanski 🏙💻 • Edited

I did mention Algorithms and Data Structures as an important part of becoming a well-rounded engineer ...maybe you think I should have put it as higher priority? Thanks for your feedback!

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shamyyl profile image
Shamil

No, you shouldn't have put "Algorithms and Data Structures" as high priority field of knowledge.

Of course, it is important to know base structures and algorithms, but it won't be very helpful in frontend projects. "Algorithms and Data Structures" don't teach you how to structure your frontend data.

What I can only suggest is to search for books, articles and examples of normalizing stored data in the backend RDBMS solutions. Using the same rules can be helpful in your frontend project and can save a lot of time of your team, when they start to improve your code.