Is this a solid roadmap to learn front end development?

[ammi1378]

Hello everyboy. I created this detailed roadmap (https://happydev.blog/mastering-front-end-development-a-comprehensive-guide) for three of my students, whom I will be mentoring over the next year. This roadmap outlines the key milestones, learning objectives, and resources that we will be using throughout the mentoring process.

In addition to mentoring, I will be documenting the entire process, including our progress, challenges, and successes. This documentation will be shared publicly in case others find it helpful or inspiring for their own learning journeys.

I appreciate your comments, ideas, and constructive criticism. Your feedback will be valuable in refining this roadmap and improving the mentoring experience for my students.

[codingdave]

It looks really decent - I'd call out to your students that once you get past the Advanced JS topics, you are firmly in the land of opinion, and you are teaching one common path, but not "the one and only" way of doing front-end dev. Because there is no such thing.

[ammi1378]

Yes you are right. i'm going to show them some other opinions like vue, remix, astro and will definitely teach them some of them (just the basic stuff and paradigms) but i will mainly focus on teaching them react & nextjs since they are more popular and intern friendly in my region.

[solardev]

Frontend dev here. I think overall the roadmap looks good and thorough. I appreciate the attention to detail.

That said, are you going to spend roughly the same amount of time on each chapter? How long is the course overall?

I worry that the curriculum might dwell too much on history instead of current practices. I know some of the old guard here might disagree with this, but in my experience, things like semantic HTML and JS DOM manipulations are no longer really used much in many frontend jobs (unless you're a framework developer). It's all React or at least something like Svelte, Vue, Astro, etc. (Personally I'd reach for MUI + React). It's all components plus styling now, not so much DOM.

To me this is a matter of hireability (if they want to be a frontend specialist, as opposed to a generalist programmer with some web awareness, or a full stack dev in a full stack web framework that still does server-side rendering). Someone who knows HTML and CSS in depth but not enough JS wouldn't really be hireable in a frontend role. It's hard enough right now for any junior, much less someone who learned the technologies of the 2000s but not the current era. I'd probably spend only maybe 15% to 20% of the curriculum time on the historical background stuff and the rest of it on modern practices.

Companies expect you to be able to take a modern codebase and jump right in to start adding features or fixing bugs, and what that needs is a lot of working experience in React and Next or similar, and lots of time working through custom hooks, props propagation, state management, client server sync and optimistic updates, error handling, etc.

That's a lot to learn and practice and not something to squeeze in at the end of a crammed curriculum. Instead I'd probably use a lot of examples and exercises that represent real-world situations and gloss over most of the ideology stuff. Like discuss the basics of accessibility, sure, but then jump right into "div soup with aria tags" and make them practice with real screen reader software. Or instead of documenting every CSS flexbox and grid oddity, have them try to make a gallery, but it doesn't have to be by hand (encourage real world libs), but add in things like sorting, filtering, and pagination. Real world problems, not purity of code.

The industry has overwhelmingly moved away from the old basic DOM model that HTML was designed around, and it's all about the JS components and their interactions these days. I'd emphasize that more than "properness" or code purity because that's where the business value is (and where the jobs are, or at least used to be before 2023-2024).

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Seperate from the JS component thoughts, I think it's also really essential for frontend devs to have some working UX knowledge. LinkedIn Learning has good courses for that if you want to steal some ideas, or just browse through recent NN UX articles.

Not only should they understand the basic thought process behind personas and flows, etc., they shoild have experience taking a Figma file and converting it into functional components, reusing values (like SVGs and colors and CSS) from the file wherever possible. A discussion about modern UI concerns (responsiveness, performance, loading states, error states, progress states, optimistic updates, lazy loading, etc.) from the user's point of view would be helpful too, and a good complement to component code in the framework (ie this is what they see and why, this is how it's coded, this is how the state is managed and shared).

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Lastly, I would be amiss to not point this out: Even learning all of this (which is a lot) wouldn't really guarantee easy job placement anymore. They'd just join the breadlines with the rest of us. It's a bit better now than last year but still pretty brutal.

Maybe some discussion with your student about business stuff like tech industry cycles, startups vs corporations, chasing fads, unionization, unemployment, interview practices, resume reviews, portfolio creation, etc. would be good too. Don't give them the impression that they'll easily find a job after the course. It's hard work, often harder than actually learning the code, I think.

Good luck! Thanks for putting together a good course.

[ammi1378]

Glade to have you here. the course would take around 1 year (just telling you 1 year because the last time i did it it took this much to handle them (around 15 students last time)).

Nowadays most of the front end developers are react developer, without knowing the basics of front end development and what's going under the hood, i personally believe if someone wants to be a good developer, they must know the details and the bits and bobs of what they are doing. I'm a little bit old school about this. overall my opinion is the same as you. i will spend no more than 20% of the time on historical concepts.

i talk to them a lot since this program is designed for some people who live in 3rd world country with little development in their region (we had an internet outage for a week. nation wide!). so they need lots of motivation and other talks. but tech industry is not that saturated and i will help and guide them until they need me (i will get the job done).

over all your comment was awesome with lots of good opinions which i will implement most of them. thank you for your time.