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Careers

Front End Developer Roadmap — Meetups and Interviews

Front end developer is a lucrative profession to be in.

It’s also fun and rewarding as front end features are built and bugs are being fixed.

In this article, we’ll look at where to meet people that may hire you.

Web Presence

If you have a web presence, then you get a bigger reach.

For instance, if you have your own social media profile and you promote that everywhere, then it’s more likely that someone can find you online.

Likewise, you can have a blog so that you promote so that people can find you there.

Meet Techies Online

We can meet techies online with various chat groups.

One of the biggest one is the https://www.reactiflux.com/ Discord chat group.

There’re many users in the group and it’s easy to get in.

Stack Overflow is also a big site where you can answer questions to show off your knowledge.

There are many Meetup groups that are virtual also.

Industry News

Front end development changes all the time.

With the Internet, we can keep up with the latest trends.

There’re also many podcasts and blogs that show us how to use the latest technologies.

Learn New, Relevant Skills

There’re many things in front end development.

To continue our career in the field, we got to keep up with all the new technologies.

They exist to make our lives easier.

Some popular new technologies include CSS preprocessors like SASS.

And some popular front end frameworks include Angular, React, and Vue.

Their concepts are transferable so we don’t have to take too much time learning them.

We don’t have to stick with the front end.

We can also learn back end skills like Node.js, Rails, and whatever we feel like.

This way, we make ourselves more useful.

Improve Your Resume

Resumes are often used to apply to jobs.

Therefore, we need to write it well.

Make sure it doesn’t have typos and the skills and experience listed are relevant to front end development.

We can follow some resume templates so that we don’t have to figure out how to format it ourselves.

Prospective employers will be happy to see a well-formatted resume without useless information.

The Job Hunt

Once we learned some front end development skills and practice them a bit, you can start the job hunt.

You send out resumes and then wait for some feedback.

You can ignore the requirements in the job description since most of them are supposed to be learned on the job.

You have to promote yourself so that someone that wants to hire you will give you a chance.

Also, friends, families, neighbors are also worth trying.

They may know someone who hires front end developers.

Interview

You should interview whether you feel ready or not.

It’s at least useful for practicing for future interviews even if it doesn’t work out.

The learning curve is a good experience.

Once you see the questions once, the 2nd time will be easier.

You can also practice common front end dev interview questions from sites like this one and practice beforehand.

Salary

The salary of front end developers can go from mid-five figures to 6 figures.

It depends on the company and what it can offer.

Conclusion

You can go to different meetups to make yourself known to potential companies that may hire you.

Also, interviews are always good practice even if they don’t work out.

Categories
Careers

Front End Developer Roadmap — Skills and Trust

Front end developer is a lucrative profession to be in.

It’s also fun and rewarding as front end features are built and bugs are being fixed.

In this article, we’ll look at the more advanced skills needed to become a front end developer.

Also, we look at ways to build credibility so that you can get hired.

More Advanced Skills

After learning the basics to become a front end developer, there’s still lots to learn.

Every front end framework has its own ecosystem.

React has the biggest ecosystem since it’s used by many developers to build their apps.

We got to learn the most popular libraries in each ecosystem.

For instance, with React, we got to learn Material, Reactstrap, etc. to let us create our apps without creating the UI components from scratch.

Server-side rendering is also becoming more popular to increase the performance of front end apps.

Popular React server-side rendering frameworks include Next.js.

If we want to create static sites, we can use Gatsby.js to generate static sites.

Some popular browser APIs include local storage, web sockets, workers, location API, notifications API, etc.

They all help us do various things much more easily with browsers.

How to Get a Front End Developer Job

We can get a front end developer job with a few steps.

Build a Portfolio Site

To show off our front end skills, we should build a portfolio site with some relevant work.

The site would have sample apps and past projects that look presentable.

We don’t need too many of them.

We can use static site generators like Gatsby to create our site.

It’s also a good chance to practice using React.

The portfolio site is a reflection of our brand.

Freelance Projects

Freelance projects are also a good way to help us gain experience and skills.

It’s one way to build production-quality apps for users before we get a front end developer job.

You can build apps, create email newsletters, update the navigation of a small business’s website, and more.

Link these projects in our portfolio page so that potential managers can see it.

You can also do charity work with some pro-bono projects.

Put Code in Github

If we wrote any code, then it should be put on Github.

This way, whoever wants to hire you can see your code.

You can also make contributions to different repos to Github.

Contribute to Open Source Projects

You can contribute to open source projects to gain experience.

Having contributions to open source projects given you more credibility.

The trust can give you a better chance of being hired.

Contributing to bigger projects gives more credibility.

So if you contribute to big projects like Ruby on Rails, Linux, MySQL, JavaScript frameworks, etc., then you improve your skills and builds trust among the developer community.

Hackathons

Hackathons are where you team up with other people to build some prototype apps and show them off to judges.

Your team can potentially win prizes.

It’s another way to make you known in the community.

Hiring managers and business owners may be in these venues to hire people so it’s another way to meet them.

Conclusion

Learning advanced skills is essential to becoming a front end developer.

Also, there’re many ways to show off your skills to get hired.