Photo by Jose Llamas on Unsplash

Becoming a Self-Taught Frontend Developer from Junior Perspective

Arda Kurt
6 min readDec 2, 2021

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The story has begun way back in time. It was ’98 and I was playing with FrontPage and trying to discover how web pages work. I was watching my big cousin how he was doing all this magic. I was a very curious and active boy in my 10s. Time has passed too quickly and I found myself playing basketball and video games. I couldn’t forget Ultima Online sessions from those days. Anyway, I started studying engineering at University. I had to work full time as well. I couldn’t find to chase my dreams in development. I tried to do but somehow, every single time it was a disaster. I do understand very well now. It wasn’t a disaster, it was a process. Everything become brighter now.

Some facts you may wonder while you reading: I am a food and documentary photographer and designer when I decided career change. I am 34. From Turkey, living in London.

You must unlearn what you have learned. Yoda

Important note: This article doesn’t contain technical information or motivational mentoring. It’s my humble “how I become a self-taught frontend developer” journey with my mistakes, regrets and how I learn from my failures and also my small successes.

Fears

Every single fear come through my mind with very strong self questions.

“Am I capable?”, “ Am I too old?”, “Do I really want to do the rest of my life?”, “Can I catch the others?”…and lots of devil question dances in my mind and try to drop shadow in my eyes. How did I overcome those questions? In my experience, I started to act. Every piece of information I’ve learned and acted on reveals the path. I answered all questions one by one. I am never too old. I’m 34 years old while I’m writing this article. I am not in the race and everybody lives their own time and life. I don’t need to catch the others. That’s pure truth for me. Fears bring more doubt with no doubt. After this point, I feed my curiosity with that doubt. I started to see my doubts as a mini-challenge. That’s my experience to use my fears and doubts not kill them. I am still afraid of some uncertainties. That I need to unlock the doors.

Explaining all kinds of fears in one paragraph is way easier than imagining. I know, it wasn’t easy. It takes a couple of years to overcome these fears.

Beginning

It was an exhausting days in Istanbul around 2015. I was dreaming about creating games, websites and I always drew sketches about characters or some UI components. I just discover CS50 in edX. It was the first course I didn’t complete. But I recommend everybody should take that course event they in the tech or not.

David J. Malan teaches @CS50
David J. Malan / https://medium.com/@malan/

CS50’s Introduction to Computer Science

Why didn’t complete the course? It’s not an excuse but my full-time job drained my soul at that time. But I learned how should I approach computer science, how I can start the research and the important part is I wanted to do.

Decisions

At the very beginning, I’d lost. After discovering the power of programming with the art vision dreaming and reality were fighting each other. I tried many different areas from programming and learn very vital small things.

The story has begun, 11 years old boy,1998–2021, Please don’t judge my timing.

#0 — HTML, CSS, Photoshop & Web Page Maker, FrontPage, Dreamweaver; That part doesn’t belong strict time period. I remember the days I created school and class webpages to share notes but it stayed only on my local pc. I haven’t discovered hosting yet. Most of the days I haven’t had internet on my pc as well.

#1 — Python & Data Science: It was my first baby steps, it was very fun to learn Python to be honest. I took a couple of courses from Udemy and tons of youtube. End of the day, I haven’t completely learnt Python but the I learn programming basics and fundamentals with Python. Also, I heard a lot “It’s a scripting language, it’s not a real programming language!#@” from extremist CS or Experienced Developers. Sorry boys and girls, they are all same for newbies at the beginning. If you aren’t willing to mentor newcomers please don’t comment on their first tweet or forum posts.

#2 — Java & Android Development: Oh boy! After very cool Python days, I remember that pale and dark day that I want to develop mobile applications on Android. Long story short, tilting at windmills is easier for me. I am talking about the days without Kotlin, Flutter and React Native etc. It was really challenging things to do develop Native Android Apps with Java. But I still learn a lot! Not Java, but design principles of mobile development. How should I manage the screen more productive for end-users? Prototyping and components mindset! End of the story, It was hard and challenging but not for me!

#3 — Php & WordPress: Actually I discovered Php-nuke, phpBB forums, Joomla, Drupal before WordPress but I really dived in WordPress and I start to earn money this time! I haven’t written a single line of PHP code at the beginning. After all, I learnt to track the code that has already been written, editing the code. I designed and built corporate and e-commerce websites in this period.

#4 — React, Node.js, JS, TS, React Native… This period of time is last year or less than a year. The major difference of this period is focus and studiousness. I’m still working another job, yes I am not working as a developer yet. However, I have been studying every single minute of my spare time. Watching videos, reading books, trying projects, developing the projects. I have been learning how I can grove intellectually myself. I believe that’s the important part.

Which courses did I take?

It’s not going to be a recommendation list and they’re not an affiliate link. But I would love to share my path. I can see, some of them are really unnecessary but it’s okay!

1 — Video: CS50 that I already mention it

2 —Video: Web Development Bootcamp by Angela Yu

3 — Video: React Complete Guide by Maximilian Schwarzmüller — I used O’Reilly but it can be found in Udemy.

4 — Book: Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software

5 —Video: Understanding Typescript by Maximilian Schwarzmüller

6 — Video: MERN e-commerce by Brad Traversy

7 — Book: The Pragmatic Programmer: your journey to mastery, 20th Anniversary Edition, 2nd Edition

8 — Book: Modern CSS: Master the Key Concepts of CSS for Modern Web Development by Joe Attardi

9 — Video: Modern Redux with Redux Toolkit & Modern React by Didem Küçükkaraaslan (Turkish)

10 —Video: Advanced CSS and Sass by Jonas Schmedtmann

11 — Figma, Photoshop, Illustrator already in my pocket.

12 — Frontendmentor.io for Portfolio Projects

Actually, the original list has tons of Youtube Videos, more than ten different courses and hundreds of hours searching google 😛. I really learn some fundamentals from those videos and books over there.

TODO List

I know it’s not going to end. Learning is a lifelong activity, I would love to touch them in 6–8 months. I can’t be expertise in the short term but I want to try new things.

— Advanced MongoDB and some other databases

— Firebase

— Authentication (I started it)

— Middleware

— Book Clean Code

— Three.js or 3D in JS and WebGL

— Redux and GraphQL (I started it)

— Next.js (I started it)

— More Typescript👽

— DApp / Solidity, Blockchain and Smart Contract etc.

— Framer

— Security of Web App’s

— React Native or Swift 😅 ` Just looking around`

— More Typescript 👽

— Vite

— Hydrogen Shopify

Thanks for bearing with me.
All the best.

Twitter & GitHub

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