Changing Pace: Frontend Development
So recently, I’ve been thinking more about what path I’d like to take in the development world. Back in the Flatiron School, I was so set on learning backend and I became great at it. I was helping people query their databases or reset their databases and I hated the frontend. As I entered my internship I’m realizing that there’s so much more to backend development than what I know, like an overwhelming knowledge gap.
I also thought that frontend development was easier and I wanted to challenge myself but I honestly jumped the gun on that assumption. I’m finding that thinking about the user interface is much more difficult than I expected. It became apparent to me when I had to present my final project and everything looked ‘minimalistic’ on my app.
I’ve decided that I wanted to prioritize frontend development because it’s a bit more on the artistic side. I’m an artist at heart and to find a space that allows me to express some kind of creative freedom is almost imperative for me. My original attraction to backend development came from the urge to be challenged but now I find challenges in frontend development.
I’ve found some incredible resources to get started in making beautiful apps or components or statics pages. All of it is just practice and the biggest challenge is understanding how to manipulate certain things. One of those challenges was to create a profile card where a round photo was centered between two divs.
In my head, I looked at the prototype and tried to break everything down. I’ll need to divs for sure but at some point, I need to overlap my avatar photo between the divs. How in the world am I going to do that? In this intermediate challenge, I found that it was a bit more difficult than I expected and it shows that I have so much learning to do BUT the process is so much more satisfying. Frontend development is much more visually stimulating and even when you get errors or position something incorrectly, it’s shown visually as oppose to a backend error that looks like hieroglyphics.
I’ve been using a website called Frontend Mentor which provides you with all sorts of frontend challenges from easy to hard. Recently, I completed the profile card challenge which looks simple but upon taking on the challenge, I found myself with a ton of questions. I’ve been writing those questions in the file where I’m working on the CSS so that I can answer them and make a bit of progress. In a way, I’m creating my own handbook that’s personalized towards me and my learning style and I suggest you do that to!
Check out these resources that I’ve been using to help me better my coding skills below! I hope they help you and as always, happy coding!
https://www.frontendmentor.io/challenges
The profile card
