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What Front-End Developer Skills Should You Focus on Leading Into 2020?

Marc Grabanski šŸ™šŸ’» on August 19, 2019

Hey there, Marc here. CEO of Frontend Masters, and we're super happy to be sponsoring the dev.to community! šŸ˜€ JavaScript and Front-End En...
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Judith

Hey Marc - you know I have a huge debt of gratitude to FEM for all the practical skills I have gotten from the courses and live workshops. FEM is a must have in my toolbox. I recently made my way through the beginner, professional and (almost all the way through) expert level of the frontend learning paths and gained tremendous confidence and knowledge. Iā€™m very grateful that you and your staff work so hard to provide quality learning.

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Marc Grabanski šŸ™šŸ’» • Edited

That's so awesome to hear! And congrats to you for putting in the hard work to advance your career!! šŸ™ŒšŸ˜„

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Judith

Btw, something I always keep handy: the frontend developers handbook. So, thx for that as well! šŸ™šŸ˜ƒ

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Marc Grabanski šŸ™šŸ’»

Nice!! Already starting work on the 2020 version of the handbook!

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Eddy Vinck

Great post! I cannot agree more about learning the fundamentals properly.

Right now I'm going through the TypeScript course and I plan to learn more about testing after I get a side project in a state I'm happy with. The CS courses are also something I look forward to learning from.

Also: I'd just like to say thank you for FEM. It has been a really big help in landing my current role.

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James Lau

Where is the best place to learn the "fundamentals" especially for folks who didn't come from a CS background? Should I grab a college text book on OOP or watch trusted tutorials from places like LinkedIn or Udemy?

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Marc Grabanski šŸ™šŸ’»

Our website, Frontend Masters (mentioned in this article) is setup for this case exactly! Check out the learning paths for a guided learning experience. Most of our teachers are not from a traditional CS background, including myself.

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Tammy Lee

Hi Marc! I loved your list!
Under the well-rounded I would also encourage developers to learn the basics of marketing in addition to design. At least the technical aspects of it. This means making sure there are hooks in your markup for marketers to use with GTM, knowing how the GTM Data Layer works, knowing enough to NOT block the bubble-up when a form is submitted so marketers can track form submissions, and vanilla JS/basic GTM tags/triggers/variables because not every shop has a Technical SEO person who knows JS.

For design skills I always recommend:
Don't Make Me Think - Steve Krug (This was the only textbook I had for my uni design students.)
Better Web Typography - Matej Latin
Refactoring UI Channel
And there is now a Refactoring UI book!

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Adriel Werlich

Svelte seems nice to learn also
svelte.dev/tutorial/basics

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Elizabeth Schafer

Meryl Streep shouting, "Accessibility!"

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Marc Grabanski šŸ™šŸ’» • Edited

Added to the article! Just a note that our courses have accessibility lessons baked into the main curriculums since many people don't go out of their way to seek out accessibility information on its own.

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Elizabeth Schafer

Awesome! I was just in the process of editing my comment to mention that I may have gone in a little strong with the giant image šŸ˜…. Thanks for writing up this list!

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Marc Grabanski šŸ™šŸ’»

LOL! All good. You're welcome! šŸ˜€

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Chris Achard

I agree that React and Vue are easier to learn for beginners :) Good post! It's valuable to see all the different skills listed here.

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Dmitrii Pashutskii

Btw if you're a student FEM 6-month free subscription recently was added on Education pack to GitHub along with other awesome things (education.github.com/pack#offers)
As a 3rd-year student, I use it a lot and now I'm gonna definetely try FEM which I heard so many good things about.

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Ezell Frazier

Why would an aspiring front end developer want to take up Python?

If one wants to build a visual interface, why?

I'm all for keeping learning on a "need-to-know" basis. This one seems way off into the distance.

Even JavaScript would be a bit too much to start off with.

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Marc Grabanski šŸ™šŸ’»

Ya, I guess it was general advice and not front-end specific.

My main point was that in the early days of learning to code ... you shouldn't get caught up in the language, just build things and have fun! Get that feedback loop going of building things.

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geni94

"Many people will be upset if I didn't mention Angular"
Nah man, we are really grateful you didn't mention that monster!

Also, the ultimate handbook/guide/bible/etc., has to be the amazing "You don't know Javascript" book series - which can easily be found on Github. It gives an incredible insight to the one of the most notorious languages, and it's fit for any level of specialty.

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Omar Gaston Chalas

This post is too much accurate. Thanks for sharing!

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Fabio Russo • Edited

I would say ... Flutter.
Right now It's mainly a mobile thing, but the Web version (Hummingbird) is coming, and Google is doing an hard push on Flutter right now.
I'm trying It and I've to admit that Dart is a really good language, and It's growing fast.

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Sara Given • Edited

Awesome. I'm working on upgrading my React skills and learning graphql right now. I think for me the biggest jump from hobby/side projects to professional developer is testing, so that's my overall focus in addition to specific stacks.

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Jeremy

Hi Sara, I agree and it is so often left till the later stages of learning or an afterthought completely. I'd recommend learning the fundamentals of test driven development from someone like Robert C Martin (aka uncle Bob). TDD is fast becoming a very desirable skill employers look for in any well rounded developer.

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Tony Brown

Marc, you and the crew at fem are the best!
You guys have some of the best people teaching the courses and the workshops are the best!
Keep up the great work!

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Loya Blaise

Thanks for this wonderful thread.

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Fat-Tony

Already following the learning path at FEM, incredible lectures and resources, I hope by the time Iā€™m done i will be a genius. Lol

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Samba

Nice article but you should have mentioned Angular tho.

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Ans de Nijs

Actually, I was looking for a course on Svelte on Frontend masters, but I couldn't find it. Will it be added to the courses in the near future?

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Marc Grabanski šŸ™šŸ’»

We're taking with Rich Harris, the creator. But nothing set in stone yet. We're currently mainly focused on React and Vue.

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PNS11

I'd like to add ClojureScript, ReasonML and SqueakJS.

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Alonso

There needs to be a priority place for JAMStack and the new trend of serverless developments.

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Chinweike Jude Obiejesi

WOw!!! i think this is so nice, i am a junior front-end developer learning gatsby and graphql presently. I hope i get better and get a job to help me more.

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FrontisBackAgain

Check this :) New survey State of Frontend - few quite interesting questions :)
tsh.io/state-of-frontend/

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Avabucks

BoxCoding is a website where we share free resources about web design and development to inspire design-focused frontend developers and to improve your coding skills.
avabucks.it/

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Mohit Verma

To prepare for your frontend/javascript interview. You can look at this ebook I created with collections of commonly asked frontend questions with solution.

mohit8.gumroad.com/l/ygass