Front End Dev — Running before you can walk

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So I was reading a post on ‘Javascript Fatigue’ by Eric Clemmons

Hang on, hang on, no its not a Sequel bear with me. I then came across this statement in the comments section:

“I’m going crazy moving from Angular 1+ to Angular 2, “learning and trying to get into” Rxjs, ES6, Typescript, bootstrap 4, materialize design, etc, etc,etc…. I’m still a jr dev!”

It dawned on me, being a front-end dev or better yet a newborn Front End dev is all fun and games when your learning HTML & CSS.

Then you get your shiny trunks & armbands & jump into the deep end to realise, you forgot to fill them with air.

Although you are not quite swimming with the fishes it sure does feel like it.

Ember, Backbone, ReactJS Flux, Redux, Reflux? , Angular 1, no wait Angular 2.0 Let’s stop there before this escalates and turns into a hip hop tune. (That only covered some popular framework & libraries mind you.)

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Hang on, hang on. I don’t want to spark a Galactic Technology stack war. These are All certainly impressive & incredibly well thought out solutions to an ever-changing Javascript landscape.

But Newborns!! you must focus, Its so hard to get sucked into the hype before you can even write a single line of Vanilla Javascript or even know how to console.log(“help..me”).

Just as the comment above referred to, I believe to get the best out of any language or stack we should

1. Learn the utmost basics to gather a general understanding of why? what? and when to use.
2. Pick a complimentary technology, find some good source material, or tutorials, and get stuck in.
3. Ask loads of questions to whomever and whoever.
4. Stay consistent then move on to the next tech that aligns with your goals.

I appreciate everyone learns differently & at different speeds, don’t beat yourself up for not understanding something which the wizards of the programming world refer to as ‘ Easy ’.

One day you will be calling it easy, I bet you think HTML & CSS are easy now huh? Not long ago you was probably bashing your head on a wall trying to figure out why your <div> couldn’t float centre? haha

The trick here is to understand why you are learning this particular tool, language or workflow & what problem it is solving. Too often these shiny new tools, seduce us into picking them up, just because they are cool.

Now I am not advocating laziness in adopting modern tech, just be cautious in what you invest your time learning especially if you are unsure why you are learning it.

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Ohh look at the time… Rocket league is calling!