Any front end developers here?

Question

Would like to hear about your daily job, day to day activities, projects, advice you would give to someone and whole experience to share.

Answer 1 · 2016-08-30T03:30:37Z

August 30, 2016 3:30am

Hi Ina,

I started out as a Front End Dev (FED), but that was 17 years ago, so as you would guess I have expanded my knowledge base a bit since then. My background was actually in graphic design & computer art, so having this foundation I found to be quite helpful when agencies would give me Photoshop files which I would have to cut up or manipulate to then build websites.

The company I am currently working for is quite large and over time things change and you get moved around. At the moment I am working in a team where my daily role includes mostly content updates on an existing framework (Angular). So while I could say I'm doing Angular Development each day, the reality is that I'm doing upkeep of a site built in Angular.

I started coding in Javascript before jQuery was a word, so I'm a bit over qualified for doing content updates, but it's where things are at for the moment. In my spare time I am working on various projects from a survey building tool I've just launched with some friends [Send out a survey](sendoutasurvey.com)(Javascript/PHP/MySQL) to playing around with Unity3D(C#) to Mobile App development (Objective C, Swift) and dabbled a bit with Android.

If you're looking to establish yourself and get a job, it seems that you have to know more about cutting and pasting these days, not whether you can code but whether you can implement Javascript libraries/frameworks. I don't have a problem with frameworks or Github, my problem is that people just plug the code in and have no real idea what is happening behind the scenes. For all purposes you will need to learn jQuery, Bootstrap, Angular etc. but don't throw away the basics. Actually just found a job which said must know Javascript, not just jQuery so maybe things are shifting.

All that said, you look to have a done a lot of learning through Treehouse which is a good grounding. Coming into a new job, you will be expected to be able to work with their existing framework but it doesn't mean it is the best for their needs. Be across as much as you can, but it is worth specialising as well. I stopped following the trends for a little while and now I'm playing catch up a bit. My grounding in Javascript/HTML/CSS is still solid, but I'm a bit behind on some of the more obscure Libraries.

If you have a passion for it, this obviously helps. I keep notes and little snippets of code in a code folder so I don't have to start again each time. From form validation samples to applying trigonometry to spin divs on the screen, play around and learn as much as you can.

I hope it works out for you and this has been some help. I do love what I do and the challenge each day presents. Cheers, :Damien

Answer 2 · 2016-08-31T11:18:31Z

August 31, 2016 11:18am

Hi Ina,

I was also interested before I started so I made a list of success stories & profiles attached to it. I would just tag them in your question details and hope they reply. From what I'm going to do: Make a website for an artist. See how that goes. Especially with the preparation, planning, performing and perfecting part I see things that could be going wrong: expectations, deadlines, obstacles, making the website and showing it, improving and finally measuring the satisfaction of the client. Then create another one for myself. Slowly build up my portfolio while learning more here. Happy to talk more if you want.

Here's the list of previous students that got a job:

http://blog.teamtreehouse.com/jacobs-story-discovering-new-career-path-tech https://teamtreehouse.com/jacobproffer

http://blog.teamtreehouse.com/bryan-knight-landed-a-life-changing-career-as-a-uiux-engineer https://teamtreehouse.com/bryanknight

http://blog.teamtreehouse.com/from-teaching-assistant-to-front-end-developer-an-interview-with-techdegree-student-steve-brewer https://teamtreehouse.com/stephenbrewer3

http://blog.teamtreehouse.com/an-interview-with-techdegree-graduate-ashley-clifton-from-nanny-to-developer-in-6-months