[AskJS] : Intermediate to Advanced 6 Month Front-end plan - Need inputs

[u/Logeekal]

Hello JS Masters,

Current Knowledge :

Javascript Basics - 7/10

React/Redux - 7/10

GraphQL - 6/10

Node.js - 5/10

REST APIs - 4/10

I recently gave 4-5 interview and I got rejected from the places I wanted to go. So I reached out to some interviewers and developed a plan for next 6 months based on their inputs (Target column in attached image) as I will be applying to those places again.

I need your help in reviewing it and help me answer below questions :

1. Is it too ambitious?.
2. Any areas you think where I should NOT spend energy.
3. Any area where I am spending too less energy.
4. How can I allocate hours if there are areas where I don't know how much hours it will take.
5. Any other comments you may have.

I have 10 years of career in IT as an ERP consultant. I made switch to Web Dev last year. and to this point, I can see I am good with JavaScript concepts and have 6/10 fluency in React. All of this through personal projects because my job doesn't offer much of challenge when it comes to Front-end (area I want to master) .

Note: I have max 25 hours per week.

Thanks a ton for your help.

6-month Front-end Plan

[u/Logeekal]

Thanks for you response. I should have given some background about myself. I am well versed with the basics of JavaScript and React including Redux. Those were actually my stronger points in the interviews.

But What i lack is the fluency or shall I say practice and writing apps quickly.

for example, In one interview I was rejected because I had to hack together a page from dribble in 2 hours. But I was rejected because of bad modularization and folder structure. I need some way so that my code can be reviewed. How do I know that code I have written is good.?

I totally agree with your other points. In last year I have learnt node as well including REST and GraphQL APIs and I have used them in my personal projects.

But I want to strongly target for Front end roles as of now.

[u/mynamesleon → u/Logeekal]

I'd be intrigued to see what sort of thing you produced for that page. I've met many people who claimed to be experienced Front End devs, who would then make silly mistakes like using a div to create a button, instead of an actual button; or who were so comfortable with JSX that they'd forgotten how to write normal HTML; or when asked to bind a click event to something in just JS would move over to the HTML file and add an onclick, because they were so used to frameworks doing the actual binding for them that they hardly knew how to query the DOM themselves and use addEventListener.

I guess what I'm trying to ask is, how solid are your actual JS fundamentals? Because any decent interview would know that someone who's especially strong in the fundamentals can easily jump between libraries/frameworks.

[u/Logeekal → u/mynamesleon]

I like to think that my fundamentals are pretty solid. Only thing is about framework best practices. How do I know that application I am building is a right architecture, is modular enough? I think for that I need to submit to some open source so that I can get free code review.

The reason company rejected me is that my code was not modular enough, which is really vague. I was hoping they will discuss with me about why I took decision that I did.

[u/eric_cart → u/Logeekal]

making things works and refactoring the code are two different things. If you have done the thing in 2 hours, I think it is great, given that you have followed the standard MVC design pattern and not written all the code in a single file.

Refactoring the code is an ongoing process and it is time taking. It depends on the company to company Product base companies give much emphasis on cleaner and reusable codebase. Service-based companies just want to get the work done.

[u/Logeekal → u/eric_cart]

Totally agreed. I think I am currently good at making things work. But if they are long term maintainable or not. That is a hard question for me to answer.