Venturing into front-end land

I've been a professional software developer for almost half a year now, and I'm still super insecure about my front-end skills. So insecure to the point where at work I make a conscious effort to avoid front-end related tasks by citing my specialty and affinity for the back-end which is a complete lie; I like the back-end because most of my professional training and experience has been back-end oriented.

Recently, I've summoned up the courage to get out of my comfort zone and take a few courses on JS, CSS and HTML, and they've certainly helped me feel at ease about rendering something on the browser. Strangely it took me this long to discover there was a huge merit to working in the front-end: getting to interact directly with what I'm building. In front-end land, I know what I'm building is pretty ugly (), but at least I'm directly responsible for the mess, whereas it can be a muddy process tracking exactly what it is that I do on the back-end.

So where am I at? Well, I think I have a loose grasp of everything in JS land. A mentor advised me to start blogging to reinforce the concepts, so here I am. Over the past three weeks, I've learned tons of new things, and I thought it would be nice to share them here. You can tell me if what I learned is BS. For reference, here are some of the topics I intend to cover herein:

• JavaScript
• React
• Vue
• D3

As for how my newfound skills will help me professionally, I'm not sure. Until I get enough practice and feel like I really know what I'm doing, nothing's going to change at work; I'll continue trodding along in Clojure land which has been my favorite land as of recent. Anyways, I hope you enjoy my writing.

Warmly,
EK