Two years of frontend development
What have I learned since I started working in frontend development
Exactly two years ago I wrote something about the mistakes I made while learning to code. Where am I now and what have I learned all this time?
That article brought me a few job offers, a thing that I wasn’t so sure it would happen. In the end, I went to a few interviews until I started working in the e-commerce department of a local company.
I remember going to interviews and with every interview that I flunked I learned something new. That’s what the positive stories sound like, right? But I would be lying if I told you that I wasn’t scared that I might not be a good fit in this field. And that I could end up without a job.
When I found my first dev job, I had to pick between it and another one, a technical writer job. I was in the last phase with both of them, and although I would’ve been more comfortable writing about software, in the end I took the frontend route.
I was lucky to find a job where my direct manager also took the role of a teacher or mentor. Because the team was small, I got to learn a lot of things from him, and I wish every junior had the chance to find someone as willing to teach them as my former manager.
Now I am at my second job as a frontend dev, and since writing that article two years ago — wow, so much time has passed! — I learned and worked with the following things:
- Worked with Magento, one of the most complex things I have ever seen. It was challenging, but that’s what made things interesting
- Learned about staging environments, the lifecycle of a project and continuous integration
- Worked on a couple of projects that were using Laravel
- Some nice tricks to improve the performance and usability of a site
- Gulp, grunt, LESS and SASS
- Versioning with git
- and a few other things that I think are ‘default requirements’ for a frontend dev, so I don’t know if it’s necessary to mention them.
The switch from writing texts to a technical job meant I had to pass some self-imposed barriers. One of them was my non-technical background. I felt that it was somehow affecting my credibility as a developer. Oh, and the impostor syndrome. I felt so out of place — and I still do — because I felt that I didn’t have the necessary skills or the right training for the job I was doing.
There is so much more to learn and I feel that what I know at this point only scratches the surface. See you in 2 years!
