Futuristic vision

  Why Is it So Hard to Find a Good Front-End Developer? It’s a fair question. To the uninitiated, front end development must seem like a breeze. But if this is the case, why aren’t front end developers a dime a dozen? The answer is simple: front end development, like any specialized trade or spectator sport, is a lot harder than it looks. It isn’t until you’ve dipped your toes in it that you realize just how turbulent the waters are. Front end development is more complicated than it seems. Not dismissing the difficulty of server-side development, it’s still important to acknowledge the problems that come with working client-side. As a front end developer, most of the work must be done in HTML and CSS, which leaves limited tools for working around bugs. JavaScript helps here and there, but feature detection comes with performance overhead. It means more code, and more opportunities for that code to fail. Plus, CSS is painful to work with once your site starts to grow...

  13 Noteworthy Points from Google’s JavaScript Style Guide For anyone who isn’t already familiar with it, Google puts out a style guide for writing JavaScript that lays out (what Google believes to be) the best stylistic practices for writing clean, understandable code. These are not hard and fast rules for writing valid JavaScript, only proscriptions for maintaining consistent and appealing style choices throughout your source files. This is particularly interesting for JavaScript, which is a flexible and forgiving language that allows for a wide variety of stylistic choices. Google and Airbnb have two of the most popular style guides out there. I’d definitely recommend you check out both of them if you spend much time writing JS. The following are thirteen of what I think are the most interesting and relevant rules from Google’s JS Style Guide. They deal with everything from hotly contested issues (tabs versus spaces, and the controversial issue of how semicolons s...

  Full Stack Developer Job Without a Tech Degree or Work Experience Six months ago, I got my first developer job as full stack web developer for a startup. I had no relevant work experience, no tech degree, and not even a year of active coding experience. And yet I managed to land my dream offer, and can today for the first time in my life say that I love my job. Here’s how I did it — the long version. Part 1: Embracing the quarter-life crisis About three years ago, I was in the middle of a raging quarter-life crisis. I’d graduated from business school, gotten an attractive investment banking job, and then quit that same job just a few months in after realizing I hated everything about it. Completely lost and quite cliché, I went solo traveling for a few months to “find myself”. And although I thought I did, I didn’t. Not enough anyway. But it actually helped me figure out a few things. The first thing was that I simply couldn’t keep pursuing a finance career. I just ...