31 Front-End Development Study Topics to Improve Your Code Quality

#javascript #webdev #html #css

If you spend a lot of time doing front-end development, you know how big the the world of HTML, CSS and JavaScript are. I came up with this list of topics after chatting with several different front-end developers over the past nine months. Some of the topics also came from my own experiences working as a full-time front-end engineer for the past three years.

The list (written in no particular order) may feel a bit intimidating now, but I am remaining optimistic about being able to continually grow my knowledge about each of these topics and hopefully commit them to memory as I use them in the wild. I actually decided to create this list after feeling a bout of imposter syndrome today at work. Now, I'm feeling excited to continue digging into each topic further!

The Document Object Model (DOM) and CSS Object Model (CSSOM)
The JavaScript Event Loop, Promises, Asyc/Await
CSS position Property
CSS Flexbox Layout
HTML Roles
Common Accessibility Issues to Always Check For
Unit & Integration Testing (Jest, Mocha, Chai, Cypress, Axe-Core)
Form action and target Attributes
JavaScript Design Patterns
Closures and Thunks
CSS Variables and Preprocessors
JavaScript as a Statically Typed Language (TypeScript)
Mutable and Immutable Types in JavaScript
JavaScript Passed by Reference / Passed by Value
JSON Data, JSON-LD, JSON Schemas & UI Schemas
HTML Meta Tags (Especially Viewport)
Different Ways Pages Zoom and How To Optimize For That
Front-End Frameworks (React, Vue, Angular)
HTML Templating (Handlebars, EJS)
Webpack / Babel
Git, Version Control and Rebasing
Jenkins, Docker, Continuous Integration
Caching
CSS Methodologies (i.e. BEM)
JavaScript Array Methods: .sort(), .filter(), .map(), .reduce()
JavaScript Object Methods: .keys(), .entries(), .values()
Front-End Performance Optimization & Speed
CSS Specificity and Inheritance
State Management (i.e. Redux)
Semantic HTML
Communicating with RESTful APIs

Feel free to leave a comment below if you have any suggestions for more topics to add to the list. Also, feel free to hit me up on Twitter @Contimporary to follow my journey to become a senior developer!

Top comments (13)

kamal somani • Jul 30 '21

You can add javascript service workers in the list.

Tim Winfred (They/He) • Jul 30 '21

Thank you!

Martin • Aug 5 '21

The nitty gritty details about script loading order: inline scripts vs external scripts, synchronous loaded vs async loaded scripts, deferred scripts, and adding scripts programmatically later to the DOM (there be dragons)
the difference between ES5 and ES6 and how to transpile
ES5 fallback scripts with nomodule and ES6 module-based scripts.
automated polyfills: what can polyfill.io do for you? how to use corejs together with babel to automatically add needed polyfills?
bundling: what is the difference between a webApplication bundle and a library bundle? How to exclude dependecies in the latter case.
package.json: differences between dependencies, devDependencies, peerDependencies
module formats in js: commonJS vs UMD vs AMD vs ES6
learning why the IIFE pattern is relevant
Events in the UI: bubbling vs capturing phase and why it matters sometimes
Why e.stopPropagation breaks other components, and e.preventDefault is the way to go.
how the css property display: contents allows you to include wrappers for elements without destroying layouts that rely on direct-parent-child: like the flexbox
how the stacking-context allows you to never again need the z-index arms race with z-index: 999999; and the likes.
onBlur where will the focus go next? nice to know the FocusEvent.relatedTarget

Pranav Nag • Jul 28 '21

thanks for the information. much appreciated

Jeremy Bryant-Berg • Jul 29 '21

Awesome list! Thank you. I'm mainly a server-side dev, but have been increasing asked to develop frontend lately and I often feel like I'm back in school struggling to keep my head above water.