In 2015 what should I focus on to become a front end web developer?

[Arkitech]

I've been dabbling with web projects of my own for some years, but now I would like to take it seriously and earn a living doing front end web development.

Can someone give me an idea of what skills to focus on to get my foot in the door? I know already some of the following skills will be needed:

HTML
HTML5
CSS
JavaScript

Also are there any websites or forums I should frequent that could help my learning? (I know of github)

Thanks for any info

 

[purbeast0]

after getting an understanding of what you have in the OP, jquery would be my #1 priority to learn and understand. pretty much every front end uses it now a days.

i'd also check out something like bootstrap as well. even if you don't end up using it, it's a great tool that teaches you how to use 3rd party libraries and make nice looking pages with minimal effort.

knowing some powerfull mvc frameworks would also be helpful. i'm a big fan of angularJS and have been using it professionally for 2 years now. whether you pick that one or not isn't really relevant, but just picking one and learning how they work would be beneficial. if you understand how they work, picking up another one would be pretty easy.

as a more advanced css thing, i'd also recommend checking out LESS or SASS (they are both very similar).

link:

https://jquery.com/
http://getbootstrap.com/
https://angularjs.org/

 

[Ken g6]

Good suggestions, purbeast! :thumbsup:

I just want to add that I keep https://css-tricks.com/ in my RSS feed.

 

[Arkitech]

Thx Purbeast, I appreciate the feedback and the links.

Can I find entry level work with just showcasing some of the projects I've worked on? Or do employers expect previous experience or a degree?

 

[purbeast0]

i can't really answer that for you personally. i've learned all of my webapp stuff on the job, and i only got the job due to my degree heh.

but if you have a portfolio showing what you can do and have done, and it's good work, a company would be stupid (and probably a bad company) to not hire you just because you don't have a degree. i think you could get entry level work without having experience at a company, because you would have experience doing it on the side and have proof to show.

i don't have any professional experience doing mobile development, but i've been doing ios and android dev for 5 years now, and if asked about my experience with those areas, i'd definitely tell them the past 5 years, but also go into detail about the extent. and then i could point them to the google play store and itunes store to view my apps.

 

[smackababy]

As purbeast stated, for front end stuff, start learning the javascript libraries.

As far as not getting a job due to a degree, it is a mixed bag. I am primarily a backend develop and don't have a degree and a few jobs I've looked into had a hard "must have a degree", regardless of demonstrated professional experience. While that is silly, it does happen. And, for beyond entry level stuff, you are going to need a good bit of experience (think 4 years of work counting as a degree) or a degree.

You could find entry level positions, but you had better do amazing on a technical screen. You have to demonstrate you know about what person leaving college knows (not much, but something). Something that might also be helpful is having some things you've done readily available to show. Do some freelance stuff (check Craig's list) and make your own site that has some cool tricks and all the source code available.

 

[Crusty]

jQuery is on its way out IMO. With frameworks like Angular and React I find myself needing jQuery a lot less nowadays.

In fact my latest project the front end is 100% JS and it has no dependency on jQuery, it's been quite refreshing to not rely on jQuery.

 

[GregGreen]

Thx Purbeast, I appreciate the feedback and the links.

Can I find entry level work with just showcasing some of the projects I've worked on? Or do employers expect previous experience or a degree?

I think most employers expect experience or a degree, but good networking can get around that. If you network with people who will step up to bat for you with people who might be hiring, you can get around not being super experienced. You just need something you wrote yourself that is good enough for someone to be willing to vouch for.

In terms of skills, I'm not sure I'd spend a lot of time learning jQuery. I'd spend most of my time really, really getting a good understanding of JavaScript as a language and spend a little time getting familiar with some patterns of Angular, React, Ember and yes, jQuery.

It'd also be good to look into stuff like BEM and building sites with components (both CSS-wise and JS-wise). React is moving this way, but even in non-React apps, the idea of building a site with smaller components both works pretty well for small stuff and scales well for bigger stuff. At my company, when we see candidates that have built a few projects this way and can explain why it's good to do things this way, we're impressed since most candidates just seem to spaghetti their way through things (with both their CSS and JS, and Angular and Backbone and...). So maybe I'm just saying spend time learning how to build things cleanly

 

[Arkitech]

thanks again guys for all the wealth of information, this is exciting stuff. My biggest problem right now is just finding time to practice and learn. However I should have something ready to showcase before the week is out, maybe you guys can critique it and give me few pointers.

One last question. At the moment I'm doing a lot of short term contract work and I'm hoping to find the same in front end design. Is that a viable option these days?

 

[Spungo]

As purbeast stated, for front end stuff, start learning the javascript libraries.

And actually make something. Make an aggregator website like Fark.com. It doesn't need to be on the internet; it can be locally hosted. Post links to things you find on the internet and put tags on those links. Can you create search feature on this website to only show links with a "funny" or a "science" tag? Figure it out. Make it happen. Can you design a registration and login system? Figure it out and add that to the site; you should be forced to register just like anyone else would. Try adding a blog to the site. Try adding customizable themes. Try to implement features like hashtags in user comments. Try copying features you find on other websites.

Copying others is often the first step to becoming better. Almost all famous comedians say they started by copying comedians they looked up to.
I put a ton of work into figuring out how to save and restore a TreeView in WPF just because the program I was trying to emulate had that feature, and I learned a lot along the way. How much can you learn by trying to create your own version of Twitter from scratch? Probably a lot. You'll discover a lot of "unknown unknowns" as Rumsfeld called them.

 

[razel]

Everyone above already has the programming aspects down, but you'll also need some basic design ideas too. styleboost.com for almost 15 years has always kept my GUI up to snuff. It's not specifically the look, but how navigation and data input/output interfaces are done and trends that pop-up that'll help.

 

[sao123]

I've been dabbling with web projects of my own for some years, but now I would like to take it seriously and earn a living doing front end web development.

Can someone give me an idea of what skills to focus on to get my foot in the door? I know already some of the following skills will be needed:

HTML
HTML5
CSS
JavaScript

Also are there any websites or forums I should frequent that could help my learning? (I know of github)

Thanks for any info

Add Jquery to that list.



Are there purely front end web developers still exist any more?
I would think a web developer would need some form of back-end experience as well...
ADO.net w/ SQL
ASP.net

 

[Ken g6]

Are there purely front end web developers still exist any more?
I would think a web developer would need some form of back-end experience as well...

JavaScript can be a backend language too.

This reminds me of a survey I saw recently.

 

[scootermaster]

And actually make something. Make an aggregator website like Fark.com. It doesn't need to be on the internet; it can be locally hosted. Post links to things you find on the internet and put tags on those links. Can you create search feature on this website to only show links with a "funny" or a "science" tag? Figure it out. Make it happen. Can you design a registration and login system? Figure it out and add that to the site; you should be forced to register just like anyone else would. Try adding a blog to the site. Try adding customizable themes. Try to implement features like hashtags in user comments. Try copying features you find on other websites.

Copying others is often the first step to becoming better. Almost all famous comedians say they started by copying comedians they looked up to.
I put a ton of work into figuring out how to save and restore a TreeView in WPF just because the program I was trying to emulate had that feature, and I learned a lot along the way. How much can you learn by trying to create your own version of Twitter from scratch? Probably a lot. You'll discover a lot of "unknown unknowns" as Rumsfeld called them.

Um, if you build this, lemme know: http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?t=2449139

 

[fuzzybabybunny]

I want to emphasize just how important JavaScript is. I took one of those programming bootcamps and the same company had classes that only taught front-end.

They did HTML and basic CSS and didn't focus on JS at all.

The result was that students couldn't make anything that even resembled a modern website because nothing was dynamic. Most clients nowadays want a dynamic front end. That means you HAVE to know JavaScript and at a minimum jQuery.

While there are frameworks that allow you to not use jQuery, such as AngularJS, jQuery is simple enough to learn (do getters and setters and you should be good for the majority of stuff) and so widely used that it makes sense to look into it.

For responsive websites and also positioning items on a grid I highly recommend using Bootstrap. Don't bother positioning things manually or trying to do responsiveness manually. Let Bootstrap handle all that.

Once you've got the gist of CSS look into either Less or SASS to make your CSS more organized.

In addition to all of this, it's good to have an eye for design and good user interfaces and user experiences. Fonts, color palettes, positioning of elements, having it look good on both desktop and mobile, etc.

 

[Ken g6]

See also: https://css-tricks.com/the-debate-around-do-we-even-need-css-anymore/

I personally think sites that don't display anything if JS is blocked are stupid. Beyond that I can see a point to using JS, but I much prefer CSS wherever possible.

 

[smackababy]

So, after starting a new job doing mostly front end, functional stuff, Javascript is the way to go. And, really learn it. I could always fumble my way through most Javascript, but in the past couple weeks, I've learned just how much I didn't know.

Even if you end up doing things in other languages, understanding functional programming and the concepts will help you a lot.

 

[Crusty]

So, after starting a new job doing mostly front end, functional stuff, Javascript is the way to go. And, really learn it. I could always fumble my way through most Javascript, but in the past couple weeks, I've learned just how much I didn't know.

Even if you end up doing things in other languages, understanding functional programming and the concepts will help you a lot.

Our front end rendering is 100% Javascript(really Coffeescript) and CSS, no jQuery involved.

We can run the client JS code on the server using libv8 to produce HTML markup for users that opt-out of JS(mostly search engines) and to also provide an already rendered view to bootstrap the JS client.

It works great and makes for a very fast and dynamic front end.

 

[purbeast0]

yeah I didn't really get the concept of callbacks and stuff until i started doing javascript, and now i really like javascript and web app front end dev is probably my favorite thing to do.

i am a fan of being full stack though. i enjoy seeing the whole process through from front to back and front (if need be). i wouldn't really want to be stuck doing just one aspect of it.

 

[fuzzybabybunny]

So, after starting a new job doing mostly front end, functional stuff, Javascript is the way to go. And, really learn it. I could always fumble my way through most Javascript, but in the past couple weeks, I've learned just how much I didn't know.

Even if you end up doing things in other languages, understanding functional programming and the concepts will help you a lot.

Also check out ECMAScript 6, the newer version of JavaScript. Not really widely used yet, but good to keep in mind.