DEV Community: OM

Top 10 Projects for Top 1% Frontend Engineers in 2024

OM — Thu, 28 Dec 2023 21:08:04 +0000

To become a highly skilled frontend developer and reach the top 1% in your field, it's essential to build projects that cover a wide range of skills and challenges.

Here are some project ideas that will help you touch upon critical aspects and features of frontend development:

1) E-commerce Website:

Skills: Responsive design, shopping cart functionality, payment gateway integration.
Technologies: React, Redux/Context API for state management, Razorpay/Stripe for payments.

2) Social Media Platform:

Skills: Infinite scrolling, real-time updates, image and video uploads.
Technologies: React, Firebase or Socket.io for real-time features, Cloud storage for media.

3) Interactive Dashboard for Data Visualization:

Skills: Data handling, dynamic charts and graphs, filters.
Technologies: React, D3.js or Chart.js for data visualization, RESTful API integration.

4) Multi-lingual Content Management System (CMS):

Skills: Content management, internationalization, user authentication.
Technologies: React, i18next for internationalization, JWT for authentication.

5) Progressive Web Application (PWA):

Skills: Offline functionality, push notifications, performance optimization.
Technologies: React, Service Workers, Web Manifest.

6) Real-time Chat Application:

Skills: WebSockets, real-time messaging, online statuses.
Technologies: React, Socket.io or Firebase, Node.js for the backend.

7) Online Code Editor:

Skills: Syntax highlighting, code execution, collaboration features.
Technologies: React, Monaco Editor (used in VS Code), WebAssembly if code execution is client-side.

8) Accessibility-First Website:

Skills: Accessibility standards (WCAG), keyboard navigation, screen reader compatibility.
Technologies: React, ARIA roles, automated accessibility testing tools.

9) SEO-Friendly Blog Platform:

Skills: SEO best practices, dynamic content rendering, blog management.
Technologies: React with Server-Side Rendering (Next.js), Headless CMS integration.

10) Virtual Reality (VR) or 3D Modeling Interface:
- Skills: 3D graphics, VR interactions, performance tuning.
- Technologies: React, Three.js or A-Frame for 3D modeling, WebXR for VR.

By working on these projects, you will gain experience in various important aspects of frontend development, such as state management, real-time data handling, performance optimization, security, accessibility, and modern web technologies. Remember, it's not just about completing these projects but also about understanding the underlying principles and best practices.

To succeed as a frontend engineer, apart from mastering project-specific skills, it's crucial to have a well-rounded understanding of various technical areas. Here are some key focus areas:

Advanced JavaScript Knowledge: Deep understanding of JavaScript, including ES6+ features, asynchronous programming, closures, and prototypes.
Framework Proficiency: Expertise in at least one modern JavaScript framework or library (like React, Vue, or Angular), including their ecosystem (like Redux for React).
Responsive and Mobile-First Design: Skills in creating designs that work on various devices and screen sizes, using CSS frameworks like Bootstrap or Materialize, and CSS preprocessors like SASS or LESS.
Performance Optimization: Techniques to improve web performance, such as lazy loading, code splitting, optimizing assets, and understanding of how browsers render pages.
Version Control Systems: Proficiency in using version control systems, particularly Git, for code management and collaboration.
Testing and Debugging: Familiarity with testing frameworks (Jest, Mocha, Jasmine) and debugging tools. Understanding of unit testing, integration testing, and end-to-end testing.
Web Accessibility: Knowledge of web accessibility standards (WCAG) and how to implement accessible web designs.
API Integration: Experience with RESTful services and GraphQL. Understanding how to consume APIs in frontend applications.
Understanding of the Backend: Basic knowledge of backend technologies, databases, and server-side languages (like Node.js, Python, Ruby) to better collaborate with backend teams.
DevOps and Deployment: Understanding basic DevOps practices, continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipelines, and familiarity with cloud platforms like AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud.
State Management: Understanding state management patterns and libraries, especially in the context of single-page applications.
Security Fundamentals: Basic understanding of web security practices like CORS, content security policy, and preventing XSS and CSRF attacks.
User Experience and Design Principles: Basic knowledge of design principles, user experience (UX) design, and the ability to translate design mockups into functional web pages.
Soft Skills: Communication, teamwork, problem-solving skills, and the ability to learn and adapt to new technologies and trends.
Browser Developer Tools: Mastery of browser developer tools for testing and debugging.
SEO Fundamentals: Understanding of SEO best practices and how frontend decisions can impact search engine ranking.

Continuously updating your skillset and staying abreast of the latest trends and best practices in frontend development is key to success in this rapidly evolving field.

Keep learning, experimenting, and staying updated with the latest trends in frontend development.

...

Thanks for reading this blog!

Add a ❤ if you liked the post. Leave a comment below if you have any questions/feedback.

follow me for more updates.

More About Author: Om Bharatiya

Note: DALL.E Images have been used for illustrations.

Happy Coding <3

What's your 1st programming language & What you use today?

OM — Tue, 17 Nov 2020 12:08:25 +0000

Hey, Dev folks 👋

What was the first programming language you learned?

And what are you using today?

Let's discuss how far we have come ....

.
.

Follow - Om Bharatiya on Twitter

9 Must Watch Movies for Programmers in 2020 🎬

OM — Sun, 04 Oct 2020 20:17:51 +0000

Movies inspire you to be a smarter and a better person, or in our case a better programmer. Today, when the world is hyper-connected, movies are the best way to see through it.

How many of you have watched these best movies?

1. The Social Network

The whole movie is about how Facebook grew as a business and the various ups and downs it had to face.

2. The imitation Game

As a programmer, You will find this movie extremely engaging.

Alan Turing, a British mathematician, joins the cryptography team to decipher the German enigma code. With the help of his fellow mathematicians, he builds a machine to crack the codes

3. Pirates of Silicon Valley

This is one of the top notch movie among these programming movies lists.

It basically tells the story of how the personal computer was designed by today's giants like Microsoft and Apple.

4. Jobs

The movie sheds light on Stev Job's personal and college life.

The movie revolves around how Apple became the business enterprise that it is today.

5. Mr. Robot

The show follows the footsteps of Elliot Alderson, a cybersecurity engineer in a cybersecurity firm ‘Allsafe’ by day and vigilante hacker operating from his computer, apprehending no-gooders by night.

This movie is fun, rebellious, got stunning soundtrack and even includes realistic aspects of programming.
(Note: It's a TV Series, not a movie but every episode is worth watching.)

6. Source Code

As the name suggests, there is some code involved :P

The hero in the movie enters the body of another person using his programming skills.

7. The Founder

This movie doesn't involve a programmer but is highly recommended if you want to start you first startup.

The movie shows how persistence, determination and hardwork pays off. It's by far the best movie I have seen when it comes to building a business. Besides that it also shows how to scale a business.

8. The Social Dilemma

"Only two organization call their customers users - illegal drugs & software". This statement is quite a relative explanation about this brilliant perfect eye opener documentary , undoubtedly it's Oscar deserving stuff.

A must watch movie for everyone. Every person living in present world is aware about how he or she is addicted to drug called social media in other words we are being used as lab rats not to discover something new but selling to customers, here advertisers are customers we are just products.

9. The Great Hack

In this eye-opening, well-executed documentary, the filmmakers meet the challenge of blending complex tech information with heightening drama. Plus, there's plenty of "rooting interest."

The thing is, in The Great Hack we end up rooting for ourselves, and the long odds of not being one of the fooled, the foiled, and the exploited, unmindful victims of "psy-ops" warfare.

Bonus - Silicon Valley

It is not a movie but TV Series and a must watch if you're a programmer.

This is about Richard, a programmer who creates an app called the Pied Piper and tries to get investors for it. Meanwhile, five other programmers struggle to make their mark in Silicon Valley.

Hope you enjoyed the list. Add a ❤ if you liked it.

Please suggest your other favorite movies in comments 👇👇

About me here: Om Bharatiya

Also read these interesting blogs by me:

React Native vs Flutter - What to Choose in 2021?

When to choose NoSQL over SQL?

Happy Coding <3

React Native vs Flutter — What to Choose in 2021?

OM — Sat, 22 Aug 2020 14:02:50 +0000

In a post-COVID world, If you’re wondering to pick any one of React Native & Flutter to learn mobile application development which can help you land a job immediately, then, you came to the right place because here I’m going to finally answer that question for you.

I’ve worked on both of them and have quite a good experience to draw a line between these two very popular and most used technologies to build cross-platform mobile applications.

Cross-platform mobile apps have been a player in the last few years and are used by some very successful and prominent applications in the market. Also, it is the best choice for the employers right now when the market itself is so frugal after the COVID pandemic.

Yet before you start working on any of them you must know which one is beneficial for you at the moment since technologies are changing every day and so the market does.

I’ll compare them based on the following points:

1. Backed by whom?
2. Job Prospects
3. More Loved & Popular
4. Learning Curve
5. Performance
6. Adoption & Community
7. UI Components and Customisability
8. Who is using them?
9. Decisive Summary

So let’s start one by one.

Backed by whom?

Well, both of these frameworks are made and backed by the biggest tech giants Google and Facebook respectively.
Google made flutter. Facebook made React.

Both Winners.

Job Prospects

React Native was launched in 2015 and the React Library on which it works was launched in 2013, while Flutter launched lately in 2017. Which made React Native handy for developers and created a good market dominance already.

However, Flutter seems to be grown exceptionally in the last couple of years. Being the best competitor indeed, we can see its good future in the job market in the next couple of years.
The demand for React native over Flutter is quite visible in this survey report by Stackoverflow as well. Check here.

So, if you’re looking for a job in mobile app development then React Native would be a better choice. Post-COVID, the job market of React Native has increased and there’re more employers looking for React Native developers to develop and launch their products in the market in no time.

React Native is the undisputed Winner.

More Loved and Popular

It’s so obvious for a platform to gain popularity over time if it has been long in the industry and serves a good purpose. But gaining such popularity & love being new is rare. So, from the same survey by StackOverflow in 2019 Flutter wins being more loved than React Native.

Also if we check their GitHub repositories, Flutter got 98.9K Stars while RN is on 89.6K Stars even after staying longer than Flutter. So it’s a quite visible Flutter is something on people's minds.

Here the winner would be Flutter.

Learning Curve

JavaScript is one of the most popular languages in the developer community and is used for React Native mobile app development. So anyone who knows JavScript already can learn “React” and hence can transition to React Native in no time.

While if we compare with Flutter, it uses the programming language Dart. If you’re familiar with Java or C++ then learning Dart won’t be tough for you. However, it’s a new language and has a learning curve. So if you want to make apps in Flutter, you need to learn a whole new language that might seem not winning in this category.

So the winner is React Native.

Performance

When it comes to performance, Flutter has the upper hand as it’s compiled to ARM or x86 native libraries, which makes it considerably fast. React Native isn’t compiled to native code, and it still has the JavaScript layer, making it less performant than Flutter.

In the future when we start to create much more intense software for mobile apps, performance will be extremely big criteria when it comes to deciding between which framework you’re going to use so actually the winner of this category is most certainly Flutter.

Adoption and Community

When it comes to building big applications, the community is a must to check. Because you might require help from people working on the same platform when getting stuck with something. So the criteria are how active and vast community you get and how much available the support is.

React Native has a massive developer community and countless 3rd party libraries & UI components to help you make your work simple. Even you get high-quality tutorials for React Native in almost every tech channel that makes it very convenient to work with.

In terms of programming languages, at least till now, Dart isn’t as widely used as JavaScript and so Flutter has a less experienced and smaller community at the moment.

While it is quite predictable that Flutter is catching up with RN very fast, yet React Native is the Winner here.

UI Components and Customisability

Flutter has its own set of custom widgets, rendered and managed by the framework’s graphics engine. It is designed to support Material Design out of the box. It saves time. A developer using Flutter can create most of the views with pre-made widgets which are easily customizable and cross-platform consistent.

React Native provides only basic out of the box components which are adaptive to a platform, like a button, slider, or a loading indicator.

As said earlier, there are lots of 3rd party components available for React Native. A developer can use them in a project but that requires additional effort and time.

Flutter has to be the Winner here.

Who is using them?

React Native is being used by Facebook Ads Manager, Myntra, Instagram, Bloomberg, Airbnb, Discord, etc. while Google Ads & Alibaba uses Flutter for their mobile apps.

So, React Native seems to be accepted by bigger apps and have better endorsements.

The Winner in this category is React Native.

Summary

React Native looks more promising for you if:
✔ you have some prior experience working on JavaScript
✔ Look for some endorsements from people already using it
✔ Might very often require additional support from the community
✔ Need a job immediately

Go for Flutter if:
✔ Performance is a big deal for you even if you are diverting from Native app developments(Android/iOS)
✔ Want things already made on your table
✔ Ready to learn a new and beautiful language
✔ You need to quickly build an MVP for your app

I hope you got a broader idea of what to choose when starting a career in any of them or building a mobile application that can stay competitive for a longer time.

You can add more points why you will choose one over the other in a post COVID world ..

...

Thanks for reading this blog!

Add a ❤ if you liked the comparison. Leave a comment below if you have any questions/feedback. I'm gonna write more interesting blogs here, follow me for updates.

More About Author: Om Bharatiya

Happy Coding <3

When to choose NoSQL over SQL?

OM — Sun, 05 Jul 2020 17:11:33 +0000

The agenda of this blog is simple. We’ll discuss various parameters that we keep in mind while deciding a perfect database for our Application Service.

In terms of data engineering, data pressure is the ability of the system to process the amount of data at a reasonable cost or a reasonable time. When one of those dimensions is broken, that’s a technology trigger and new inventions happen that result in new data technologies. In simple terms …

SQL is not obsolete, it’s just that now we have a different choice.

Before we jump up to comparing SQL and NoSQL databases, let’s take some time to appreciate the fact that SQL has been long into the industry (over 30+ years) and still has a good place in the modern application development environment.

Comparison Time … 🤞

SQL: Optimized for Storage
NoSQL: Optimized for Compute/Querying
SQL: Normalized/relational
NoSQL: Denormalised(Unnormalized)/Hierarchical
SQL: Table based data structure
NoSQL: Depending on DBs, the data structures are …
★ Key-Values(DynamoDB, Redis, Voldemort)
★ Wide-column i.e. containers for rows(Cassandra, HBase)
★ Collection of Documents(MongoDB, CouchDB, DynamoDB)
★ Graph Structures(Neo4J, InfiniteGraph)
SQL: Ad hoc queries
NoSQL: Instantiated views
SQL: Scale Vertically & Expensive. Can Scale Horizontally but challenging & time-consuming
NoSQL: Scale Horizontally & Cheap
SQL: Fixed schema, altering requires modifying the whole database
NoSQL: Schemas are dynamic
SQL: Good for OLAP
NoSQL: Good for OLTP at scale
SQL: ACID(Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation, Durability) properties
NoSQL: BASE(Basically Available, Soft state, Eventual consistency) properties

When to choose NoSQL? 👍

For our application service, when it comes down to ...

✔ Well-known and well-understood types of access patterns
✔ Want simple queries
✔ Not much data calculation involved
✔ Have a common business process
✔ OLTP apps

If this is true, then NoSQL is a perfect Database and would be most efficient. We have to structure the data model specifically to support the given access pattern.

When NOT to choose NoSQL? 👎

If our application service has the requirements to support ...

✔ Ad-hoc queries. e.g. bi analytics use case or OLAP application
✔ May require “reshaping” the data
✔ Complex queries, inner joins, outer joins, etc.
✔ Complex value calculations

So in brief, for our application service, if we understand the access patterns very well, they’re repeatable, they’re consistent, and scalability is a big factor, then NoSQL is a perfect choice.

PS: Mature developers don’t use the word “flexible” for NoSQL databases. There is a difference in being dynamic and flexible. Data model design is an intelligent engineering exercise in NoSQL databases.

What your opinion over my discussion up here? Why do you choose NoSQL over SQL?

...

Thanks for reading this blog!

Add a ❤ if you liked the comparison. Leave a comment below if you have any questions/feedback. I'm gonna write a Series on DynamoDB here, follow me for updates.

More About Author: Om Bharatiya

Happy Coding <3