One year ago (on september 1st 2013) I started working for the NOS, and I’m convinced it’s one of the best choices I’ve made.
Even before fully graduating I had multiple job offers from different companies and different roles (front end dev, e-commerce/magento dev and as an allround dev). I would have learned a lot by now, form working at any of the companies. So one year after making this big choice, I’ve come up with a small roundup of the most important things I’ve learned as a front end web developer.
Responsive Design
Even though most of the things I’ve developed for the NOS are not responsive, I still have learned a lot about it. We are currently working on a massive responsive website (soon to be released) which forces me to come up with durable and solid Responsive solutions. It is, and probaply will be for quite a while, a challenge but it is so much fun! I really enjoy working on responsive projects because they are so much more dynamic and interesting.
It is not just the development of a responsive website, the process is a challenge as well. There are no fixed sizes or exact pixels that need to be converted from an image/psd to code. Working closely together with the UX/Design guys has become more and more important! At certain moments I’ll be looking over the designs or existing (coded) pages with our designer, just to check if I’ve interpreted and implemented it correctly.
RequireJS
Structuring Javascript has become more of a standard in the past year. Instead of writing just pieces of unconnected and heavy html-structure related code, I’ve changed to writing more modular and generic code. RequireJS has been a very useful tool in achieving this. One year ago I did not entirely see the point of using a module based loader, but while working on this big project I discovered it is almost a necessity to keep everything maintainable.
While going through the documentation for the first time, I thought it would have a steep learning curve. It turns out to be quite easy after all. In case you’ve be struggling to get your head around the documentation: just use it and I’m sure you’ll understand it quite soon!
I’ve also been playing around a bit with AngularJS but I haven’t quite mastered it. Perhaps I’ll be writing about it next year.
SASS
Best professional (and perhaps personal) investment of the past year, without a doubt! After using it for about a year I’m convinced Sass has saved me days, perhaps even weeks, of time! Even though it is a mayor time saver, it also helped me in writing more maintainable and structured CSS. I used to work with Less, but I’ve switched to Sass because of the available debug and development options it offers in combination with Google Chrome!
Please slap yourself in the face if you’re a front end developer and haven’t use a preprocessor at all, yes do it now, because you could have made your life so much easier! Our job is, at times, hard enough as it is so please just use those great tools at our disposal.