Years later, as I stand at the corner of Yearning Street, I will remember that afternoon when I took my first software engineering class in college.
【 a 】
“What can I do for this big assignment? I have to develop a software in two weeks. Idea has to come up with my own idea.” My roommate seemed to be asking me, but also like just grumbling, I stood on the balcony of the bedroom overlooking the shade of the half of the chicken farm, pretending to be calm, in fact, a number of panic.
The panic was tinged with intense curiosity.
Since I chose computer major in university, I have always wanted to develop my own software, but I know nothing about engineering, and I am used to jumping between black and white command lines repeatedly. I learned a little theory this semester, and now I have a chance to put it into practice, but I hesitate to take the first step. After two days of technical research, I found a development tool: “CAN package HTML, CSS, javascript into android application”, wow ha ha, except for the “Java” I have recently learned, other words look strange, but it is said that easy to use can try.
While checking the API of the development tool and turning over the documents of W3School, a small tool with a “local” flavor was born, which has some simple functions such as schedule reminder, daily event time statistics, historical task query and so on. Of course, the public function of weather query is also essential.
Little did I know at the time that it would have anything in common with the software I now work for.
【 2 】
In my spare time, I also started to skin the tool and even used the textured wallpaper of my phone as the background. Gradually, I found that I had an unexplained preference for interface experience, and began to like browsing all kinds of websites with elegant interface or cool dynamic effects. In addition to feeling the designer’s ingenious intentions, more curiosity in the heart, how to do this?
The front end.
I remembered the small advertisement in W3School and began to make sure that these two words would accompany me for the rest of my college life.
“They don’t teach front-end in school.” Immersed in matlab coding roommate banging on the keyboard, head also said to me.
“It’s all code anyway.”
I started the self-study period of love and killing with the three musketeers. When there was no evening class, I read the major front-end learning websites, MOOCs, geeks, niuke and KE characters were absorbed by me most of the data. From drawing a button to drawing a blog interface, and then learning jQuery, I increasingly feel that front-end coding is like a good pen. Later, there was a short period of time when I even went off the deep end, writing games with Cocos2D-JS and drawing 3D with three.js, experimenting with all the possibilities that front-end languages could do.
Some are glad they barely made it to the end of the slash-and-burn era, wringing their hands over IE compatibility and crying for CSS3’s new features.
At that time, front-end modularization and engineering have been prevailing, CommonJs, AMD, CMD specifications for the swelling front-end code volume provided timely rain; Build tools such as Gulp, Webpack, FIS3 give the front end a “compiled”, “packaged” hierarchy. Front-end development is moving toward greater complexity, but also greater efficiency and sophistication.
React was expanding, vUE was budding, and the new generation of front-end framework system was gaining momentum.
[3]
Six months later, I was the only person in my class to intern for a front-end position.
Half foot into the society, every day two hours between the company and dormitory, this way and back, I realized in addition to the class of continuous sleepy, but at least to the full energy. Over the past month, I made some JS plug-ins and wheels with Webpack, transformed the internal API document into black and white piano keys style, and enjoyed the freedom of acting as a designer.
Later, I was lucky enough to join the college student entrepreneurship program and become the only leader in it. I am still grateful to my former classmate, whom I would like to call “the leader”, for giving me the best opportunity of self-practice in my college life. Of course, I also had the opportunity to save money for graduation trip.
“School, is the front end will eventually meet.”
I borrowed the internship to get the idea, began to be born from JSP business website to do my meager power. Adaptive, compatibility, lazy loading, dual-end decoupling, lack of design resources, imitating Taobao to build a shopping cart, before using gulp, using shell script to do a simple pre-compilation. Since the site will be aimed at real customers, start thinking about additional details of the interactive experience.
What the front end can do and whether the front end can do more. I’ve been looking for answers.
[4]
After graduation, I went to a state-owned enterprise in Hangzhou, which was in the process of technology structure migration. I fully embraced React. The then supervisor and TL trusted me to build the internal micro-service of the first version of Node. During this time, I was in self-entertaining mode by writing some fancy technical articles in the Nuggets community on weekends.
A year later, I came to Dingding and got a glimpse of the iceberg of alibaba’s front-end technology accumulation on the day I was hired. I was lucky.
The front end has already gone beyond the definition of the front end in Baidu Encyclopedia. It is moving forward with the development of technology today. We can start to put the interface on the web, in the APP, in the firmware, and even on any screen you can see. Containerization, such as applets, can also develop near-native levels of fluency through new language patterns, allowing more imagination for dynamics; In the field of engineering, all kinds of frameworks, modularization, packaged construction, single test, cloud deployment, Node service, Web IDE, the front end has already gone out of the interface, began to have the ability of multi-dimension.
Here, the service can reach tens of millions of enterprise users.
Here, there can be a full discussion with the product and design.
Here, senior brothers and supervisors will be able to accompany you to ridicule chat, or even open the black mentor.
[5]
As two and a half years of practice students, looking back on these short but precious days, I hope to bring some sporadic inspiration to students who are about to step out of society, I think we will be fellow travelers.
The next time I stand at the intersection of Yearning Street, I look forward to meeting you:
“Hello, classmate!”
