On changing career direction..

Situation assessment

2019 is here and it’s always a good time for introspection and to assign ourselves new directions. For my part, it’s been a few month already that I took the decision to focus on an intense front-end development learning. Why ?

• I tend to feel more challenged and excited when I build something coding than designing, it has to do with scaffolding and organising bricks of logic that form an overall working interface
• I want to handle how things looks inside a concrete usable product, not only through the graphic layouts
• It’s not hardware-dependent, therefore, the workflow is “flowing” better as IDE + browsers are the main work tools.
• Jobs market perspectives are higher in this field and will continue growing

A year ago, I wrote something about being picky with the chosen fields to avoid burn-out.

I’ve been applying this so far, but I’m eager now to go towards more complicated things to build such as progressive web apps or static sites. Those kind of stuffs requires to get hands way deeper in javascript methods, javascript frameworks, and a lot of third party services as the industry is evolving this way.

It's way above coding a simple landing page or build a Wordpress theme with my current skillset.

Learning path

Just after finished the short 3D film that took me 10 working months, I decided to focus my energy to rework on all the javascript basics.

For 2 months, I used Freecodecamp on a daily basis until I got my "JavaScript Algorithms and Data Structures” certification. Freecodecamp is a wonderful free learning platform that covers a lot of topics. It is based on everyday practice, and we get small problems to solve in an online code editor.

Just after this, I enrolled in vueschool.io, a learning platform dedicated on Vue.js. I completed the main course and it’s challenging to follow as the instructor goes at a very fast pace + the presented project (a complete forum) is quite complex. Nevertheless, It’s well organised, and the interface is neat.

Next

Now, I’ve barely have the basics to start and I plan to work on side-projects to get a deep comprehension of the whole modern front-end tooling. The goal is to land 4/5 projects, push them on my Github and build a solid portfolio to pretend applying for a junior position/job in the industry.

Beside this, I don’t plan to completely drop my design skills : I’m aware that having a strong design background is a strength and I can take advantage of this so I'll still work on designs, at least to maintain what I’ve built so far. But focus is on web development this year.

I’ll make another assessment in a year or so, so that I could keep track on this planned transition and how things happens.