This is my very first post on here, let's get started :)
Before we get to the three months of work, let's talk about my background first. So, I'm a 20 year old developer who studied web development in Québec, Canada. Here, we don't have code bootcamps (or well recognized ones) and we don't go to university right after high school, we have to go through cegep first. Now, what the hell is a cegep? It's a general and vocational college. In a cegep, you have 2 choices, you either go into a pre-university program that usually lasts 2 years and you go to university(as the name suggests) afterwards, or you go into a technical program that usually lasts 3 years and you can typically get a job right afterwards and that diploma also grants you access to university.
I chose a technical program, Techniques d'intégration multimédia(it's in french, sorry) to be precise. This program varies from cegep to cegep, But the program at Cégep de Sainte-Foy (The cegep I attended) is regarded as the best one for web development in the province. It's the best, because they are very in tune with the industry and the needs of employers. In the 3 years I was there, we learned about web design, front-end development, back-end development, agile meetings, client meetings, we even learned video production and animation. They really wanted us to be prepared to do and to be anything once we graduated. in the first two semesters, we only learned the basics (obviously) and we only learned vanilla everything. We didn't touch any libraries until the third semester and to my knowledge, we never used any frameworks, the only non-vanilla technologies we used were jQuery, Sass, suzy(that was before css grids), a tiny bit of laravel and a tiny bit of wordpress. They were very adamant about mastering the basics before diving in the endless pit of frameworks and librairies, at first, it really bothered me, I felt like we were behind everyone and that we didn't learn enough. I felt like that until my internship during the last two months of cegep.
I interned and currently work at Nurun Québec from March 18 2018 to May 11 2018. During those two months I learned a lot. I worked on two very different projects as a front end web developer, I can't talk much about the first project, but we used mostly jQuery, Sass and handlebars. I never learned handlebars before, but with the documentation, helpful coworkers and some prior experience with twig, it was fairly easy to pick up.
The second project, however is a completely different beast, a bunch of different git repos that do different things, a team of over 30 people, about 10 or 15 of them developers. My biggest challenge was to learn Angularjs (and the whole project structure). I was legitimately scared, I never used Angular before, I didn't even know what it was used for, but again, with the official documentation, helpful coworkers (well mainly one coworker, because he was the only one with angular experience), a dash of "Google-fu" and nearly three years of experience with vanilla JS, I was able to learn and become one of the go-to angular guy in just a few months. Now, I'm nowhere near being an expert of any kind, I wasn't even at the top of my class in school, but I was able to succeed due to my knowledge of the basics, my ability to listen to the people around me and to my sweet sweet google search skills.
All this rambling and backstory telling to say that you don't need to focus to be a "Angular developer" or "React developer" or "Vue developer" or any other framework developer. Simply focus on being a good developer, become a master of the basics and you will be able to master and conquer any framework or library that comes your way. If you're still not convinced about that, I suggest you read these two articles, written by people way smarter than me:
Why You Shouldn't Use A Web Framework
The Web I Want
And if you made it this far, thank you very much for reading this and I apologize for all the rambling and grammar mistakes, I'm always opened for constructive criticism and to have my ideas challenged.
Top comments (12)
I totally understand where you're coming from Gabriel. I am a web developer and recently got a job where I interned.
I too believe in learning the basics and fundamentals first before moving into frameworks and sophisticated libraries.
Thanks for the post, and good luck at your new job 👍
Thank you very much :)
Guys and this goes to everyone that's commented; I'm wondering about how I can improve my skills with recursion. Literally I'm so bad; and I'm wildly embarrassed by it. Someone said it's not commonly required so that I should chill and just keep slowly working at it, but honestly it's the one thing that I think to myself "OMG I'm so bad will I ever improve".
Thank you for the article btw. I love hearing how people first started and your English is awesome man.
Find recursion problems at codekata.com/ and other code challenge sites. Practice till you dream about it.
So it'll just come if I keep nurturing over time then?
Thank you for the reply btw.
You could also practice binary tree algorithms, implementing iterative versions as recursion, it's really nice way to get going as well.
Your link to The Web I Want is broken :) (Not the web i want :p)
Oh no! definitely not the web I want either. It's fixed now :)
"...and to my sweet sweet google search skills." Best skill ever.
I also very much agree: learn the basics, know the basics, understand the basics. Everything else after that is syntax sugar.
It bothers me many developers from Java, to C#, to JS, to Golang lack to the fundamental understand to TCP/IP or that an HTTP response is one string that is parsed and processed by the browser, which is an over glorified word processor if you think about it.
But as technology advances it also needs specialized workers to understand the idioms and nuances of specific tech. Just...don't pigeonhole yourself before you even begin.
I look forward to more of your writing Gabriel.
Completely agree! When I started professional programming I wish I'd learnt C++ properly before diving into MFC and COM frameworks.
You lost a backlash on your shrug face. Try double backslash to escape it \
Oh no!! 😱 Thanks for letting me know!