How to learn frontend as a newbie?
I work at a pretty early stage startup and I've historically only done backend. There's been a lot of new scope on the frontend side and so I'm now having to start getting some of the frontend features working as well. But the issue is the codebase seems to be using a lot of the newer frontend techstack like next.js, tailwind CSS and redux and whatnot.
I've never written any frontend so I'm kind of starting from scratch. How do you recommend I tackle this?
I know the common taro advice is to learn by doing but given that frontend is almost a different skillset I'm not sure what's the best approach.
Should I spend some time watching lessons or tutorials or try and hack together a small side project or should I just learn as I go?
Discussion
(2 comments)- 2
2 months agoTech Lead @ Robinhood, Meta, Course HeroShould I spend some time watching lessons or tutorials or try and hack together a small side project or should I just learn as I go?
I highly recommend doing the latter. I've literally never gone through a full Android tutorial in my life (and back when I started Android dev in 2013, the tutorial landscape was far worse so this was largely by necessity).
Here's another great thread about this: "Front End Engineering"
- 12 months agoEng @ Taro
A lot of modern frontend technologies were created because they addressed problems with libraries in the past or because browsers weren't able to handle a use case in a simple way.
For example, it might be hard to understand why people use React unless you've had to add/remove DOM elements using Jquery before. Or, it might be hard to understand why you would use Next.js unless you've tried to render React components on the server before.
You probably could jump into the code immediately, and you'd probably be successful in fixing smaller bugs, but you'd be taking a lot of guesses about how everything is working together.
I would dedicate 1-2 hours reading about React, Next.js, and Tailwind so you can get a sense of what they added to the web ecosystem, and how they work at a fundamental level. This might be reading 10-20% of each of their documentation. I would avoid reading 100% of their docs because a lot of it won't be relevant. You can always go back to read the rest of the docs as you come across specific issues with your particular codebase.
