I have never thought I would enjoy doing any front-end work, but this term I really spent some time building my skills in the front-end. For my small side project I learnt Vue.js framework and for my capstone project, I designed and created two pages – the landing page and user profile page. At first, I was really nervous about not meeting my own expectations as well as my team’s, because I found it’s so hard to convey my ideas using code to appealing designs. I felt frustrated when the output did not go the way I wanted and I did not have the knowledge to get to where I wanted. In class CS340 and CS361 where I built web pages for both classes, I took the shortcut by taking code from Bootstrap and built a very minimal viable website with it. But let’s face it, there is no shortcut in software development job, and it’s not realistic to do the same in real work. So I think now is the best time to face my fear and do some good work here. After two weeks working on the capstone project, I really felt I learnt a lot. Although I’m far from becoming a good front-end developer, and I’m merely talking about using html and css to build up something nice, I’m happy that I’m not afraid of it anymore and these codes started making sense to me. I have been enjoying front end so far and I wanted to learn more. I have set my next goal to learn JS and DOM. First I will recap what was covered in CS 290. I had to admit that I didn’t dedicate my time in that class due to various reasons, so I can hardly write any code in JavaScript. Now thinking about it, I should not waste $2000 and time and come out of that class with the minimum. The class was structured to introduce some fundamental stuff and I should use the opportunity to deep dive into it. After all, I still need the skills when I go into the workforce. So this is kinda a lesson learned. 

I came across this guy’s blog about his journey to become a front-end web developer and think it provides some good resources. This is the link to his blog:https://ahmedmokhtar.dev/blog/my-journey-to-become-a-front-end-web-developer/. He shared classes he took on Udacity and Udemy and his experiences along the way. I think it’s pretty inspiring. My next plan is to pick one of the classes and keep learning the fundamentals.

A screenshot of the landing page

A screenshot of the user profile page