Before the words
There have been a lot of rumors about the web front end in recent years: talent is scarce, it’s easy to learn, it’s lucrative, it’s growing. I met a colleague who was not familiar with background development and asked me what I needed to master in front end learning. I also heard that an IOS developer was going to learn front end by himself for half a month and then look for a front end job. I also saw someone praising the shortage of talents in front end market like this:
Right now, there is a shortage of front-end engineers in almost the entire Internet industry, not just for start-ups, but for public companies and even giants. Yes, good front-end engineers are rarer than pandas. … …
Not only in the domestic Internet industry, but also in foreign countries, front-end engineers are in high demand and short supply.
For such adulation, neither oppose nor support. Because each person’s position, experience is different, there will always be different levels of understanding. And as a rookie from Chengdu, metamorphosis into a Beijing fierce rookie, but also to talk about their understanding of the front end.
Regional differences
In most companies in Chengdu, there is a web engineer who is responsible for cutting and typesetting. They need to know some PHOTOSHOP and then be able to use HTML and CSS. Such people tend to be recent graduates, for whom responsive layout is a great skill. It’s my honor to be one of them, and because of this, I have mastered the skilled cutting skills. This level may be considered as easy to get started by outsiders, but in fact it is far, far away.
The other kind, is a bit more powerful programmer. They know JS + a back-end language such as PHP, JSP. However, they tend to be more back-end oriented. They treat HTML, CSS, and JS as basic things. More logic is handled in backend languages, and there is no clear separation between HTML pages and backend languages. So we often see pages that end in.php,.jsp.
After coming to Beijing, it is to see the real web front end. So that there is often a kind of hate why they did not come earlier feeling, as if in another world. With the gradual improvement of my study, I will feel that the front end of Beijing has a clearer direction.
We will really pay attention to user experience, so every page will be responsive layout, adapt from THE PC to the minimum 320px width of the mobile terminal, pay more attention to the application of HTML5 / CSS3 related knowledge, but also do a lot of functions for user experience more reasonable processing. I really think about how to optimize front-end performance, a common interview question. So we use gulp+require to build the front-end code, compress, package, and upload the CDN.
In general, in Beijing, the front end is more professional and clear, and the development is better.
Whether hobbies are important
I’ve thought about this very carefully, and many of my predecessors have told me, “Interest is very important.” However, after careful analysis of my own situation, I came to a contrary conclusion. I didn’t find anything interesting that would make a living for me. And now I also think that as long as I can continue to work hard in this way, I can still have a place in the front-end industry. Realistically, if you can get down to it and not reject it, you can choose it. After all, people have to eat, to support themselves, I think most people are not able to live on their own interests.
The 10,000-Hour Genius Theory tells us that by focusing for 10,000 hours on a subject, you can become an expert in that area. I think the same thing is true on the front end, where focus is more important than interest.
Three, what mentality will affect their progress?
“Don’t firm“
What I can say for sure, at least now, is that the front end is not a bad choice. In the early days, it was often a back-and-forth between UI design and the front end. I think I’m more interested in UI design. Especially after participating in the design of a video player app of China Telecom, I believe that I have the opportunity to become an excellent UI designer in the future. But I also think I can improve myself a little faster in the front end. So in a very long period of time entangled in this issue vacillation, stagnation. In fact, no matter which direction the firm choice, in the current Internet industry, is a very popular choice, have a day. And the greatest mistake of all is to hesitate.
“The impetuous heart“
If I don’t end up being a good front-end engineer, then the biggest reason is definitely a fickle mentality.
Everyone wants to be a knowledgeable, experienced, respected front-end engineer in a short period of time. I also think, this is difficult to avoid a mental problem, other people’s high salary and their plight is always so easy to disturb the mind. So slogans like one month from beginner to master, three months from beginner to master are very popular. In fact, this is not possible. Training institutions with slogans like these can only get you started. It’s even possible that an old classmate who has been up and down in the front-end industry for years can’t claim to have excelled in the industry. It’s not that you can’t become excellent in a few years, but there are very few people who can settle down and devote themselves to practice. So the truth is, slow is the fastest
A few years after graduation, I feel that the biggest obstacles on my way forward are these two mental problems. I hope I can calm down and sort out what I have learned and share it with you, so that others can understand themselves more simply and directly, and also exercise my own mentality.
How to deal with the endless emergence of new technologies
A lot of times I think the front end is too much for newcomers. If you want to learn a UI framework, there are easyui, Bootstrap, Foundation, etc. WordPress, Jekyll, Hexo, grunt, gulp, WebPack, jQuery, Angular, Vue, React, etc. It’s hard to tell who’s better than who at first. Take a lot of detours if you’re not careful.
So at this point we have to understand a truth. The importance of foundation is that it can improve our ability to learn.
Bootstrap, AngularJS started with me as a legend, out of reach. And many companies are looking to hire people with these skills. So start trying to learn when the foundation is weak. Obviously, there is little effect. On the contrary, it will reduce my confidence in the front end, and it will be easy to shake and feel that they are not suitable.
However, as I got more basic, IT didn’t seem that difficult to master Bootstrap and AngularJS. I was even able to look at the document and use it in a very good way. This would have been unthinkable to me before. Therefore, from the former unattainable to the present within reach, LET me understand the importance of foundation.
However, react and Webpack, which are very popular recently, do not feel as unreachable as before. The popularity of these techniques means that there are many people who can learn them and there is no bottleneck that is particularly difficult to master. If you have a solid foundation, you are on the technology bandwagon.
Fifth, the front end is not as simple as imagined
The front end is not simple, not in the knowledge of the grasp, the implementation of technology, but in the search for a better solution. Even the simplest page layout, good solutions is also emerge in endlessly, in college, for example, table element is commonly used to implement almost all of the page layout, to understand the document flow, now using floating and all kinds of box model, landing the etc. To achieve this layout for a new person in the middle of the gap is very large.
From the initial writing a lot of JS code to achieve a small function of a page, to later found that some people only need to use a few lines of code with HTML/CSS can control all the animation of the whole page, this gap is also very huge. So the front end is not as easy as it seems, or even as easy as mastering a back-end programming language. So we have to be in awe.
Methods of learning
From the perspective of my cognition at this stage, I think the most reliable way to learn is to accumulate slowly, which is a process of precipitation and will be very long, but I must stick to it. It is a common illusion that knowledge seems to be getting easier in the Internet age, and many people are worried about the so-called information glut. In reality, however, it is much harder to capture information that is truly useful to us. However, front-end knowledge is relatively more scattered and fragmented and increasingly diversified, so the accumulation of knowledge is a very important process.
In general, in the front of the road, encountered shaking, confusion, confusion. There are also because of impetuous mentality stagnation. But they all came one step at a time. And I can be very sure to tell myself that this direction I choose will not shortchange my efforts and efforts, and will bring corresponding returns to my efforts and efforts.