Rasaq Sodiq

My First 3 months as a Front-end Developer

My First 3 months as a Front-end Developer

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Rasaq Sodiq segun
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4 min read

Table of contents

If you are wondering, what can you learn in 3 months as a Front-end developer? I put down a summary of what I have learnt in 3 months. This article contains the following:

  1. An overview of my first three-month, as a frontend developer.
  2. My takeaway from those 3 months.
  3. Beneficial resources that helped me along the line.

so, let's dive right in.

Disclaimer: This article is based on my personal experience. it is just an overview of what worked for me.

The journey:

I registered as a trainee in an academy for front-end development. In this Academy, I got access to a constant power supply, an average internet connection, and I interacted with folks with similar goals.

I started with GitHub. GitHub is a code hosting platform. With GitHub, you get to do basic things like:

  • deploy your code online
  • Share your code with others
  • clone peoples code to run on your local PC
  • host your website

you can learn more about GitHub on GitHub docs. All links are provided in the resources section below.

Once I got comfortable doing basic actions on GitHub, I was introduced to HTML (hypertext markup language). HTML is not a programming language but a markup language. It is used to structure a web page.

The combination of W3schools and MDN documentation gives a double combo in understanding HTML and web-related tools.

I created a resume and a cloned Gmail web page with HTML only. There are tonnes of editors out there that can be used to write a well-structured HTML page however, VScode is widely used.

Screenshot (195).png my HTML-only resume Screenshot (196).png a cloned Gmail web page(HTML only)

After structuring a web page with HTML, the best is to style it with CSS. I learnt a lot of CSS Basic properties like:

  • CSS Box Model
  • CSS Flexbox
  • CSS Grid
  • CSS Animations
  • CSS units
  • CSS colors and so on.

I get great web-related content from Kevin Powell on Youtube and read new tricks from css-tricks.

Games are also a fun way to learn a concept quickly. I played Flexbox Froggy and Grid Garden to master Flexbox and Grid.

I take challenges from frontend mentor and pushed them to my GitHub account.

CSS Responsive Web Design is another basic part of CSS. Responsiveness is the ability to get your website to look good on all media devices. This process shows your ability to combine good HTML structuring and CSS Media Queries. CSS Media Queries is used to add certain breakpoints for certain designs to work on different devices. Kevin Powell created a 3-week course to conquer responsive layouts. The course is the best have seen so far on CSS responsive design. check it out!

The last part of the 3 months was spent on synthetically Awesome Style Sheets (SASS) and Basic javascript. CSS is very easy to write but gets complex when you have to write a long landing page or a multiple page project.

SASS is a CSS preprocessor. It makes writing CSS a lot easier. Using sass for a bigger project is a common practice in my academy. Get started with sass or check the website I created using sass; certifying.

Finally, I learnt basic javascript such as:

  • troubleshooting javascript
  • variables
  • numbers and operators
  • strings
  • arrays

I also created some javascript projects like:

  • Bulbswitch; where I used javascript syntax to toggle a switch and on a bulb.
  • Surface area of a Sphere calculator.
  • Guessing game clone.

Javascript at first was hard to comprehend, it is the first major introduction to programming language I got. There are a lot of resources out there to learn Javascript. I personally use the folloowing:

My Takeaway:

There is definitely a lot to learn, you can't learn everything. You will eventually get comfortable not knowing everything and you will get better at making choices. No matter how long it may take, be consistent and always get the basics before moving to the next ' thing'.

What's next for me:

  • Get better at javascript and pick new javascript frameworks.
  • Work on projects. I am taking up 30 days javascript challenge.
  • Apply for an internship to gain work experience( kindly recommend one for me). -Never stop learning.

Resources:

Frontend DevelopmentBeginner DevelopersHTML5CSSLearning Journey