Online practice interviews. Get guidance & feedback on how to improve, what you should learn and whether you're ready to get a job as a frontend developer.

There is one skill that is more important than any other for success in coding

The most important skill for new frontend developers


If you're just getting started as a developer then one of the first things you'll want to know is which skills are the most important. I remember when I was dipping my toes into the coding pool, concerned that I might not have what it takes because my math skills were underdeveloped and extremely rusty. I remember googling how important math was for coding (answer: not very for frontend in general, but it doesn't hurt..), ready to give up if I came across a blog post that confirmed I was destined to be stuck writing SEO content for a living.

It doesn't stop there, of course. Some of the other things that consume the beginner's mind are questions of what language is the best one to learn (answer: if you're doing frontend, HTML, CSS & JS are your bread & butter, and um..jam?), what is the best course to take, which framework is the best, etc. 

I'll let you in on a secret: after 8 years of coding I still do searches about what is the best X for Y. I've used Express to build servers on Node for years and every so often I'll search for Express vs Hapi, or Node vs Django, or MongoDB vs Postgres. Really I think that's fine - it's natural to want to know what the most important thing to learn is, because there's an opportunity cost to everything - every minute you spend learning Angular is a minute you don't spend learning React, or Vue, or Svelte..

I want to share something that I really, truly believe very strongly:

The most important skill to develop when learning to code is persistence. To put it another way, it's the skill to put up with massive amounts of hair-pulling frustration and the ability to keep going despite that. There is no way around it - when you're learning to code you're going to run into a million bugs, and they aren't going to make sense, and some of them will require hours of searching on google & Stack Overflow and Reddit and Github and docs & blogs. You're going to see red lines of text in the console that may as well be alien language, and after a day and a half you'll yell at your screen cursing whoever decided that was a helpful description of what was *actually* wrong with the code.

> the most important skill you'll ever have as a developer is persistence.

It gets worse! I promise you it will get worse before it gets better. You'll make progress and actually start to think you understand how all of this works, and that will make the next brick wall all the more painful. You'll find that some errors are silent, or that you missed a symbol, or you mispelled something and that a single missing letter just vacuumed away 2 hours of your life and possibly contributed to the premature graying of your hair.

That's why the most important skill you'll ever have as a developer is persistence. While there's some kind of baseline of intelligence & capability, it's really not very high. You don't even need a university degree, provided you're willing to put in the time & the effort and bash away at the keys and feel very stupid indeed and keep coding despite all of that. If you keep doing that week in and week out, on the weekends sometimes and definitely on occasions where you'd much rather be surfing Hacker news or watching Netflix, one day you'll find that some of the errors and mistakes that kept you up at night start fading away. You'll find yourself at the end of a day of coding realizing that you didn't even have to search Stack Overflow (at least not that much..), and when you do come across an error you don't miss a beat - you search your mental repo of past errors and find the solution and just keep going.

The only way to get to this magical pseudo-Nirvana is to persist. To know that frustration and anger and confusion are an inextricable part of the process, and that if you really, honestly want to make coding a career (be it in a job or as a founder), the only way forward is through, to take a deep breath and push past the wall.

So yes - keep searching for the best javascript framework, or the best database. Keep looking for the one frontend course to rule them all, the best keyboard, the best code editor. Work on your maths, learn computer science, read the blogs, do all of that.

As long as you persist, you'll make it. 

Good luck!

Jake

Some tips, tricks & techniques to help you become a better coder

Surefire ways to become a better coder


If you’re reading this then the chances are that either you feel like you’re not living up to your full potential as a coder, or you’re a straight-up beginner with your head spinning. I can totally empathize — I’ve been in your shoes — hell, I’ve been coding for years and I still feel like it’s my first day of school. No worries. I spend a lot of time talking to coders who are much better than myself, and through those conversations I’ve learned a few things about how to improve — quickly & efficiently. I want to share some of those tips with you now so hopefully you can level-up with less stress. Let’s rock’n’roll.

## Just Code Baby\*

###### \* If you are not coding every day yet still posting “how can I get better at coding” questions, please stop reading this now and go and f\*cking code 😉

Ok, let’s begin with a disclaimer. I hate when people say things so obvious you feel like punching them in the face. I really do. So please — hear me out on this one. I read a lot of posts on r/webdev where people want to know what they should do next, or ask how they can become a better coder. Think about it this way — how good do you think Michael Jordan would have been at basketball if all he did was sit at home and read books about the sport?What if all he did was shoot lay-ups exclusively with his right hand? We never would have heard of him. He became great by playing basketball every day — by playing it with a competitive fire and challenging himself in every facet of the game. If you want to become a better coder, then you have to:

1. code every day
2. always push yourself a little bit harder than before.

So now that Captain Obvious has declared his face super-punchable, here are some practical ways for you to code every day in fun ways that challenge you:

- Find layouts on [Dribbble](https://dribbble.com/search?q=music+player) / Behance and try to recreate them in Codepen.
- Grab some open APIs from [Programmable Web](https://www.programmableweb.com/apis/directory) or [Todd Motto’s List](https://github.com/toddmotto/public-apis) and come up with novel ways to rinse, rearrange & display the data.
- Build a single-page pong clone using only pure JavaScript.
- Try coding ‘real life’ layouts. By this I mean take a layout from say, a magazine and then challenge yourself to [recreate that layout in code](https://www.chenhuijing.com/blog/css-grid-flexbox-combo/).
- Run experiments in different way. If you find it easy to build something with the help of jQuery, try building the same thing using only pure JavaScript and Web APIs.

<img class="my-8 mx-auto" src="/images/blog/trying-stuff.jpeg" alt="stuff" />

## Build Something Real

I tried learning to code a few times before the penny dropped. In hindsight, the reason is obvious — I was stuck on the Tutorial Treadmill. The Tutorial Treadmill is when you spend all of your time building to-do apps and creating throwaway code that doesn’t _really_ do anything. This is a surefire way to lose motivation & inspiration.

My personal coding journey really took off when I decided to build a web app that actually meant something to me. When you decide to build something personal, unexpected challenges will come at you from all angles, and by tackling these challenges as they arise you’ll start to build a repository of techniques to handle them. I started with building a simple chat program for my friends, and by the end of it I was interfacing with APIs, handling user-authentication, integrating animation libraries, configuring servers and much more. I didn’t know that I would be doing any of those things when I started the journey, but once you have the core of a project going these things will crop up naturally while you build them.

> no one is going to hire you when you show them that you’ve successfully managed to copy and paste 12 Scotch.io tutorials

An added benefit of building a Real Thing™ is that you have something of substance to share with interviewers & companies if you decide that you’re ready to enter the job market. You’ll definitely want a few of these projects to pull out during interviews — no one is going to hire you when you show them that you’ve successfully managed to copy and paste 12 Scotch.io tutorials. You should also be using a version control system like Github to manage the code of your Real Thing™, which means that you can always add the repo address to your portfolio & resume.

## Look At Professional Code

If you build for the web, you have the opportunity to see how professional developers are working every time you open up your browser — it’s as easy as opening up the dev tools on your browser and inspecting the code. You can learn techniques and tricks just by seeing how the pros arrange their HTML, utilize CSS animations or integrate libraries to make the magic happen. If you think that the website you’re visiting looks good, feels fast and is glowing with quality — open it up and see how they do it.

Beyond that, there is more quality code than you could ever read sitting on Github waiting for you to clone it to your local machine. Choose a library with say > 500 stars but that isn’t gigantic — something very useful and very popular without being gargantuan. You’re free to inspect the code and see how they achieve their results. You’ll learn a lot just by mentally reverse engineering the code to figure out how the software works, and in the process you’ll likely get a fly-on-the-wall view of properly commented and well-configured code. That’s a free & invaluable resource just waiting for you to get your hands dirty!

Finally — you might begin to understand the code well enough that you can start to think of ways to improve it. How modular is the code that they’ve written? Are they using monolithic functions that could be broken down into smaller, more readable elements? Are they using objects efficiently, or importing an entire library to complete a simple task? When you start to notice these things — when you can say “not sure why they did X, I would do it like Y” — you will know you’re improving.

## Learn a Different Language

Coding preferences can sometimes devolve into the PC Master Race argument, whereby language X is for undisputed champions and Y is for shameful noobs. While it’s true that PHP sucks (kidding! ..kind of), the beauty of programming languages is that every one of them has strengths and weaknesses. There’s an old saying attributed to Mark Twain: “to the man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail”, and this kind of mentality can get in the way of becoming the best coder that you can be.

While the rise of NodeJS and Universal JavaScript means that it’s possible — and at times preferable — to write the front and back-end of a project in JavaScript, it may not always be the most efficient. JavaScript began as a cute little language to handle browser-based functions, and has grown like crazy over the past decade to become the language of the web, but there are other languages that shine in different ways:

- Ruby & Python are multi-purpose languages with very readable syntax and rock-solid frameworks (Ruby on Rails, Django).
- Python has become the de-facto standard for Machine Learning in recent years.
- Java, C# — Knowledge of those languages can enforce a more rigorous understanding of ‘how programming really works’ under the hood (by necessity). Java has been at the top or near the top of in-demand programming jobs for over a decade.
- C is a compiled language that is transformed directly into machine code — it’s very ‘close to the metal’ and learning this will force you to understand the physical & theoretical underpinnings of computer science.
- APL is a programming language that looks more like ancient Sanskrit and is mainly used by Operating Thetans of level 8 or higher.

You don’t have to go out and learn every other language under the sun, but having a knowledge of what other languages do, how they do it and why people use them will give you a much richer understanding of the coding ecosystem in general.

## Do Freelance Projects for Cheap / Free

While the general consensus is that you should [never use Upwork to get freelance work](https://hackernoon.com/why-you-should-never-use-upwork-ever-5c62848bdf46), I think that it can actually be a pretty useful way to improve your coding skills. Look — an economic race to the bottom is never a good idea, but on the other hand, necessity is the mother of invention. If you take on a smallish project on Upwork (or a similar freelance platform), you’ll not only be simulating the conditions of honest-to-goodness freelance coding work, you’ll also be under some time pressure, which is something that your own projects generally won’t offer (unless you’re super strict with yourself).

Even if the payment is ludicrously small, you can think of it as though you’re getting paid to learn — which isn’t such a bad deal since learning usually costs money. You’ll also feel a little bit of extra pressure to deliver high-quality work, which is going to force you to learn best practices and do your research before marking the job as complete.

If you’re morally opposed to Upwork et al, you can even add in some feel-good juice by offering your services to not-for-profits and local charities. The upside of this is not only that you get to feel all warm & gooey on the inside, but the bar generally won’t be raised so high when you’re upgrading the local soup kitchen’s website from a 90’s-era codebase. [FreeCodeCamp](https://www.freecodecamp.com/) and similar websites offer you a lot of options when it comes to donating your time, and it’s a win-win situation.

## You Are Never Finished

Realize that you’re never “done”. There’s not some oddly-calm code ninja waiting at the top of an ice-covered mountain to pin a “Winner!” badge on your sweat-stained lapels once you’ve successfully managed to put together a functioning Webpack build without swearing. Unfortunately.

> A journey of 100k LOC begins with a single LOC. - The Buddha, maybe

No matter what you learn, coding just keeps on going. You could be the number-one expert in your area of expertise and a few years later be totally unemployable _cough_ ActionScript coders _cough_. Even when you’re feeling pretty solid with your skills, just remember that there’s some uber-keyboard jockey working for a Wall Street trading firm who dreams of binary code and poops algorithms. Don’t sweat it — be the best that you can be and keep on coding.

Good luck!

\- Jake


A shout out to some of the people who (unknowingly) helped me on my journey through code, and a call to pay-it-forward

The myth of the self-taught programmer


I taught myself how to program. I spent a few months hunched over a keyboard, eyes slowly atrophying in the dim artificial light, and bit by clumsy bit The Knowledge magically flowed into my brain and somehow became lodged there.

Except, that’s not true.

The truth is that I didn’t teach myself how to program. I had teachers. I had dozens, if not hundreds of teachers — mentors who taught me the ins-and-outs of i/o; the ifs of if-thens. While it’s nice to bask in the warm, fuzzy glow of boasting that you’re self-taught, it’s disingenuous. If I had truly taught myself how to program that would be insanely awesome, and impossible. If you know how to code, you had teachers, whether or not they were physically present in a Comp Sci class or asynchronously sharing nuggets of gold via well-written blog posts.

It might seem like I’m splitting hairs with this argument, but it’s actually important to make the distinction, because in the modern world of web-development we stand on the shoulders of others who have laid out a path for the rest of us, whether through direct instruction or by [sharing open-source software](https://hackernoon.com/why-i-open-source-79ac7867b97f#.wli8ws3p3) without which our revolutionary to-do app simply wouldn’t work.

This year there has been a lot of talk (at least in the front-end community) about [‘JavaScript Fatigue’](https://medium.com/@ericclemmons/javascript-fatigue-48d4011b6fc4#.oxhp8fxnx) (including deliciously recursive JavaScript Fatigue Fatigue) and a sense of overwhelm that comes with all of the open-source libraries & frameworks out there. This reinforces the point that good teachers have never been more important for beginners — teachers that can help guide the new entrants through the noise and onto a path towards competence. Every noob that makes it over the initial hurdles of learning to code has the opportunity to become a teacher — and from that replenished community will come the next great (free!) tools. It benefits us all to do our best to teach & guide beginners, and to acknowledge the interdependence of our skills.

> good teachers have never been more important for beginners

As with any type of communication on the internet there are always some inherent chunks of negativity embedded within open conversations. As a community we should do our best to reject this. Although new programmers might not all be children, we need to accept their questions as though they are — responses to ‘dumb questions’ should be more ELI5 and less EVIL. Once upon a time it was you who was asking what a server was, or trying with furrowed brow to understand the difference between CSS and HTML. (Of course, there are always a special few who came out of the womb understanding closures…).

There is the saying that ‘hindsight is 20/20’, and some of us are guilty of looking back at the path that we’ve taken and seeing a single, self-generated stairway to coding heaven. Yet, anyone who has actually learned to program knows it’s [tough as hell](https://mikehadlow.blogspot.de/2015/12/learn-to-code-its-harder-than-you-think.html) and there is no way to make it through without helping hands. It’s easy to fall into the trap of saying that you’re ‘self-taught’, because at some point in the process we begin to suffer from the [curse of knowledge](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curse_of_knowledge), which makes it very difficult to understand the beginner’s mind. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try. It’s easy to take all of the (free!) information offered to us for granted and not pay-it-forward. That isn’t the right approach. [Each one teach one](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Each_One_Teach_One) — that should be the motto of the modern developer.

It’s important to shatter the myth of the self-taught programmer because it shows all of us in the coding world that the cycle of learning & teaching should continue. When you reach a certain point it becomes not just an opportunity, but an obligation to continue that cycle.

Thanks to (some of) my Teachers:

### Books

[Eloquent JavaScript](https://eloquentjavascript.net/) — Marijn Haverbeke

[Essential JavaScript Design Patterns](https://addyosmani.com/resources/essentialjsdesignpatterns/book/) — Addy Osmani

[You Don’t Know JS](https://github.com/getify/You-Dont-Know-JS) — Kyle Simpson

[Idiomatic JS](https://github.com/rwaldron/idiomatic.js) — — Rick Waldron & Contributors

[JavaScript Allonge](https://leanpub.com/javascriptallongesix) — Reg Braithwaite

[Speaking JS](http://speakingjs.com/es5/index.html) — Dr. Axel Rauschmayer

[Human JavaScript](http://read.humanjavascript.com/) — Henrik Joreteg

[Modern JavaScript](https://mjavascript.com/) — Nicolás Bevacqua

### Guides

[JS The Right Way](http://jstherightway.org/) — Multiple Contributors

[Superhero.js](http://superherojs.com/) — Multiple Contributors

### Blogs

[Pony Foo](https://ponyfoo.com/) — Nicolás Bevacqua

[Coding Horror](https://blog.codinghorror.com/) — Jeff Atwood

[Eric Elliot on Medium](https://medium.com/@_ericelliott) —Eric Elliot

[Rising Stack](https://blog.risingstack.com/) — Multiple Contributors

[CSS Tricks](https://css-tricks.com/) — Multiple Contributors

[A List Apart](http://alistapart.com/articles) — Multiple Contributors

[Code.Lengstorf](https://code.lengstorf.com/) — Jason Lengstorf

[Milan Petrovi Blog](https://blog.petrovic.gr/) — Milan Petrovi

[Todd Motto](https://toddmotto.com/) — Todd Motto

[Scotch.io](https://scotch.io/) — Multiple Contributors

[David Walsh Blog](https://davidwalsh.name/) — David Walsh

### Newsletters

[A Drip of JavaScript](http://adripofjavascript.com/)

[Pony Foo Weekly](https://ponyfoo.com/weekly)


An honest description of the initial difficulties most beginners will face when first starting to learn how to code

SNAFU - Honest thoughts on learning to code


Your head will break before the keyboard does, I’ve learned that from personal experience.

Coding is often great, long stretches of Sisyphean boulder-pushing in exchange for brief epiphanies; a muted level-up. There’s a strange, hysterical joy to be found in discovering that the last 2 hours of _utter confusion_ was due to that one line of code you missed in a lengthy tutorial. Be prepared for many hours of frustration and feeling like the dumbest person alive. Prepare for it, and embrace it — for better or for worse, computers aren’t like people, and 60% of the time the problem is human error every time. There is strength in the knowledge that there is indeed a solution to your problem, you just can’t see it yet, because it is you. Persist until you find the answer.

## Getting Started

Learn to type. Can you type? Without looking? No? Stop reading this and learn to type. Seriously. You need to be able to type 🙂 If you can’t take 2 – 4 weeks to learn how to type with both hands (no looking!!) then you aren’t going to be able to handle learning to code.

Can you type yet? Good. Ask yourself if you actually want to code or it’s just something you heard was cool these days and being a hoodie-wearing billionaire might be nice to try out for the summer. Read the first sentence of this article. That’s not a joke. The reason programmers are well-paid, in-demand and (generally?) respected is that to get to that level requires rare levels of patience and persistence. Is your garage filled with dusty guitars and discarded dumbbells strewn with cobwebs, abandoned after an initial honeymoon period? Don’t marry code at Vegas weddings. Save yourself the pain, honestly. Some people just aren’t suited to coding. Maybe try marketing?

## Bootcamps or Blogs?

Balance tutorials with reading blogs & building stuff. Build something (anything) as quickly as possible. It will suck, that’s ok. It can help to watch a few videos and do some Codecademy / FreeCodeCamp / [insert online service] to begin — do online courses and try to get started on a real project ASAP — a 1-page portfolio, a site that pulls sports scores from an API, a wall of photographs using CSS filters. Tutorials often don’t prepare you for the ‘real world’ of coding, real learning starts with doing (and you never stop Googling no matter how advanced you are). I didn’t start to really understand programming until my 4th or 5th start, when I chose a project and fumbled my way towards an end-goal. Building things also makes the concepts concrete — after your 23rd To-Do app you’ll want to make something useful 🙂

Bootcamps are definitely an option, and the more reputable ones will push you hard and give you guidance in a way that you can’t replicate online, but keep in mind that the very best are going to set you back ~10–15k. Do your research, ask people who have gone through them, weigh the options. There are enough free resources & tools to learn to code without doing a bootcamp.

## Tools of the Trade

Get a nice chair. You’ll be sitting in this thing for hours, days, weeks. Get something that’s adjustable, with armrests, that feels comfortable and won’t break your butt. Get a good one, then dream of getting a better one.

More monitors are better. 3 is the sweet spot, after that there are diminishing returns. Coding on 1 screen is possible, but so is riding a unicycle. Not sure if that’s the right analogy, but I don’t ride to work on 1 wheel. You know what I mean. The moment I moved to 2 monitors (for front-end work) my productivity increased massively, same with 3.

Get a sweet mouse, something ergonomic that you can cradle, something with weight that rests in your palm and makes nice clicky noises and has adjustable scroll. Some coders will tell you they never use a mouse, and I’m happy for them. Try Vimium for web browsing if you don’t like mice.

Keyboards ain’t keyboards. I couldn’t type on those little Apple keys to save my life, but give me a large brick that resists every press and makes clacking sounds and I’m good to go. Here’s a tip; once you go Mech you never go…uh. Forget it. Here’s a couple of places to get you started: [r/MechanicalKeyboards](https://www.reddit.com/r/MechanicalKeyboards/) [mechanicalkeyboards.com](https://mechanicalkeyboards.com/)

Choose an editor / IDE. Try a few of them out and see what works with the way you think. One man’s Emacs is another man’s Sublime Text, and the twain shall never meet. Syntax-highlighting, in-built test suites, macros and auto-completion can save you hours in the long-run, so don’t settle until you like the look & feel. I like Webstorm, but that was after a few years on Sublime, and trying Atom. I’ve also heard Visual Studio Code is pretty awesome now (and it’s free).

#### UPDATE 2020: I've been using VSCode for 3 years now and it's amazing, free, fast & beautiful.

## JavaScript is English

JavaScript is the Lingua Franca of the web world. It may not roll off the tongue with the neat inflections of Ruby, or terse enunciation of Python, but if you’re going to be coding for the web then for the foreseeable future you’re going to be using JavaScript. In the past few years it’s gained a crazy amount of traction, and with that has come support, education, courses, frameworks and fatigue.

While you will hear advice that you should learn a strongly-typed, functional language to gain a foundation in the core tenets of programming, realistically if you want to start building websites or apps then a solid understanding of vanilla JavaScript is a good place to start.

If you’re planning to build websites, get HTML, CSS & JS under your belt. You can learn them all asynchronously. jQuery is useful, JS frameworks are useful, CSS preprocessors are useful, but get the ‘big three’ into your head before worrying about where to go next. When the student is ready the master will appear.

#### UPDATE 2020: I barely use jQuery anymore, so while the foundations haven't changed (HTML, CSS, JS), you'll want to get a framework under your belt, and React is what I recommend.

## Don’t Give Up!

As I mentioned, it took me a few attempts at coding before something clicked. One of the things that pushed me over the edge was that I started building a project that made all of the theory vivid and real, and the other thing was that I just became mature enough to understand the need to persevere even when it’s boring, hard or infuriating. [The Dip is real](http://sethgodin.typepad.com/the_dip/), but don’t give up. For me learning to code is like knowing how to talk to a genie. While it would probably would be more entertaining if it sounded like Robin Williams and wasn’t so sensitive about punctuation, it’s really cool when it starts granting your wishes. Just get started, it’s worth it.

Good luck!

\- Jake
