If you were advising someone getting into front-end development in 2020, what languages, frameworks, and libraries would you put on their "must learn" list?
Nick Scialli (he/him)
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What languages, frameworks, and libraries would you put on a front-end developer's 2020 "must learn" list?
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Top comments (21)
Every developer working on the frontend should have the fundamentals of all these topics in some form or another by the time they hit the mid-level generally speaking.
Developers who come from a wholly JS or perhaps a backend role who complain about HTML, CSS and JS kind of irk me because usually it is a misunderstanding of how they work and the developers fault, not the language, which is fine since we all make mistakes but the fact that these languages are and for a long time have been ridiculed in many cases as "not real languages", etc gives an eminence of superiority to those who do the ridiculing and perpetuates a cycle of bad coding practices and repeated complaints over things that aren't that hard if you have the foundations in place using well defined best practices on the frontend.
Accessibility is a basic requirement by law in most countries and yet is fundamentally ignored by so many developers I have come across in almost 8 years of being a developer. Lately awareness, etc, is bringing attention to why that is a fallacy but for now it is a hugely prevalent issue in companies and projects large and small. Take the Web AIM 1,000,000 survey for example which shows the scale of problems, even topics like aria which are meant to make things better by giving developers a way to provide correct semantics to users with access needs are actually being misused and misunderstood so much that actually the results show that more errors are being made, not less! This is a travesty.
Are we not professionals? Should we not be learning the basics and building upon them instead of making arbitrary skill-maps? sure, use react but what benefit does it have? angular, sure but the same question... all of these ideas and comments are arbitrary and so opinionated even if not intended to be. Validation, value creation and reasoned steps are how technologies should be chosen on a context by context basis. Not personal non-objective ideation. Here is an interesting set of points and a talk about demanding professionalism in tech.
Learn HTML, CSS, JS, A11Y, testing and design fundamentals before anything else. Frameworks are irrelevant if you don't understand what they are built upon.
Sorry for the rant,I just feel it is so, so important to advocate for the fundamentals because they are often missing from many companies, people and places I have seen and known to date. We need to take things a bit more seriously and like any other profession, take a step back, get the fundamentals right and then use the frameworks and so on that abstract for us. If a mid-level to senior-level frontend developer (and this as happened before) tells me that they are very experienced with Angular and when I see the markup output being wholly against best practice and semantics totally ignored... I wonder how they can be a self-respecting frontend-developer, I really do. Same with CSS, something as simple as vertical alignment or some layout thing will eventually end in the ever-hilarious:But should that be the case? Layout is a css fundamental and just isn't that hard once you get the fundamentals down. As peter himself would say, professionals lacking fundamentals are what really grind my gears and naturally all of this is aimed at non-beginner devs.
Some notes on other peoples comments though since the post was advising for "someone getting into front-end development in 2020":
Let's be sane about our recommendations and expand more than just a few points, not meaning to offend anyone, honestly, but hopefully those points make sense.
Amazing reply!
I totally agree with your comment, thanks for that.
Yes you can and I plan to turn this into a post in the coming days actually so watch this space!
I really thought it was the post
Get back at the fundamentals, basically I wrote a blog post on this here: dev.to/alexandrudanpop/becoming-a-...
After fundamentals are solid try Typescript and maybe a JAMStack framework.
I personally would also look at Svelte because it's a different paradigm then what we have with React, Vue and Angular right now.
Rust, WASM & 11ty
Must learn
Strongly recommend
Svelte, Dart, Lua.. (edit: Learn basic Lua but code in Moonscript)
Angular Typescript
This will be the tech stack that I will be using and learning in 2020
Currently im done with vue, vuex, mixin, axios
My next target is vue native and vue electron
Then mastering expressjs
Atomic CSS and tachyons
I would have them learn JQuery, actually. So much of other learning will be based on JQuery since it was so popular for a long time.
We're still on jQuery where I work. It's sad. We tried moving to Vue and ran into difficulties.
:( Not surprising, sadly. It's really hard to migrate old code and is reallllyyyy expensive for the business. I don't think you are in the minority...