My Journey To Becoming a Front-End Engineer
Introduction
Let me introduce myself- My name is Htoo Maung Maung and my colleagues call me Franzy. I’m a full-time frontend engineer with one year of production project experience.
November 2020 marks exactly one year since I started working as a full-time frontend engineer. This may not sound like a lot of experience, but finishing one full year as a frontend engineer has been an important milestone for me.
This is because I had no “real” experience doing UI/UX and frontend development prior— and not much programming experience in general beyond some basic Javascript, CSS, HTML and ReactJs training I got from a few online courses.
Along the way, I have upgraded my skillsets from very helpful and knowledge resources like Medium, Stack Overflow, and Reddit channels.
How I started my journey
It all started with the article that I read about atomic design pattern. After reading through the concept, I was inspired to apply the concept and the best way to do it is to build a simple project with the concept.
After self-studying online for few months, I realised how frontend development is pacing at full speed and how web development is progressing fast. And I found out that JavaScript offers something other languages lack:
Freedom!
The more I dug into it, the more I had more reasons to experiment frontend development. There are over 1.6 billion web sites in the world, and JavaScript is used on 95% of them (1.52 billion web sites with JavaScript). Virtually every computing device in use today runs JavaScript, including iPhones, Android phones and even the space technology.
Transition
The first thing I tried was to create a simple website that can be shown in my portfolio. So, I started building my simple website.
Then, I started learning React as my primary frontend framework. The main reason is that React has a learning curve that is not so steep and it allows us to create fast, scalable, and simple reusable UI components. Another main reason is that it is used to create one of the most complicated social media application — Facebook.
I made a lot of mistakes during my one year. Overall, I had to continuously learn the the nature of Javascript. This is because in many ways, JavaScript is a broken language. These can make life insufferably hard if you don’t fully understand them.
Thankfully, I have knowledgeable and positive colleagues who helped me overcome the difficulties that I faced. They constantly motivated me to try new things, even if things went wrong sometimes.
Conclusion
On hindsight, I learnt a lot about what not to learn to become a better web developer.
As a developer we should strive to make variable and function names understandable in English, even if it will take more effort. Reuse variables as much as we can to reduce the memory footprint of on the browser, so as to achieve the better performance. Check every pixel of the UI since everyone can see them and glitches are the first thing to spot on screen. Last but not least, try to write clean code as much as we can. People very often recognise and value clean code writers.
My advice to anyone who wants to switch careers is to start something first. Everything else will naturally come later.
