A story-first newsletter for frontend devs who want to stand out, earn more, and engineer their ideal career
The "how to become a better frontend developer" army bootcamp (part 2)
Published 22 days ago • 2 min read
ALRIGHT YOU MAGGOTS
Welcome to class 102 on how to become a better front-end developer. My name is Mauro Accorinti and I will be your drill sergeant for this email.
Please continue imagining I'm screaming at you throughout this email for the most accurate experience possible
(Pssss... In case you missed it, I started a 4 part series on becoming a better frontend developer. The first part is here)
Let's see if your tiny little developer brains can remember what we learned last time
I taught you about the purpose and goals of a front-end developer. They were:
To build web pages based on designs and requirements with best practices
To work well together with others (Project managers, developers, clients)
To advocate for and create the best user experience possible
I even made it easy by putting together a Venn diagram that represented the intersections of them all.
Today we're going to talk about frontend skills
If I were to ask you today what skills a front-end developer needs, what would you say?
HTML, CSS, and Javascript for starters. Maybe you'd name a framework. Maybe you'd mention testing. Server-side Rendering. I'd give you a gold star if you mention accessibility.
However, as I mentioned before, these skills are only a third of what front-end development is about. That's because when I ask you about skills, your itty bitty baby maggot brain thinks about hard skills. While leaving soft skills, which represent TWO THIRDS of our profession,right on the table.
(As a quick reminder, hard skills are specific, measurable, and easy-to-quantify abilities or knowledge you can learn. Soft skills are more about interpersonal and behavioral skills which are more subjective and harder to quantify.)
Going back to the front-end goals, while all the skills inside "Build web pages" are hard skills, what lies in the other two groups are soft skills.
Soft skills are important in our profession because we are the devs who work the closest with users
We are responsible for the literal presentation of our work. We work on what would be the face, design, and representation of a company, idea, project, or person through websites. Not only that, but we also have to work together with clients, other developers, and the rest of the team to make sure we're all on the right track and building something we all agree on.
To do that, we need soft skills that aren't usually trained. Just to name a few:
How to communicate clearly and concisely
How to give and receive feedback
Empathy
How to collaborate with design teams and other devs
Creativity
Adaptability
Soft skills are a key aspect that we don't usually work on, but define most of what we do. So work on them maggot!
In the next email, we'll talk about meta-skills and where they fit in our road to being better front-end developers. I'll end this off by giving you a mostly full list of front-end skills I could think of.
Class DISMISSED!
Full list of frontend skills: (Remember that many have overlaps between each other)
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