alwaysBeLearning();

May 07, 2017

In the fast-paced world of front-end development, there is no standing still. At the same time, it can be very overwhelming to try and keep up with all the new frameworks, the new javascript features and so on. Below I have some tips on how I do my best to stay up on all of this.

Focus

While it is tempting to learn all the new shiny frameworks out there, I would suggest researching the top few you have your eye on, and then pick the one that you think fits your needs the best and focus on learning that one.

Sign up for newsletters

Newsletters are a great way to catch up on everything that is happening around the dev world, without having to curate it yourself. They tend to be either daily or weekly and have great content in which you can pick out the ones you are interested in, read those articles, then get back to what you were working on.

Here are some that I find really useful:

Watch Tutorials

*Affiliate links to products I have personally used and found very helpful.

Read a lot

Read articles, tutorials, eBooks, actual books, etc. While reading, I recommend taking notes or following along with the tutorials. By taking notes and following along, you are more likely to remember what you have learned, and then be able to use it when you are working on your next project.

Do

Learning is one thing, actually putting that knowledge to use, is a whole other thing. While making simple to-do apps is a good way to grasp some concepts of the framework you are using, actually making something useful will help further your new found skills. Think of something you would like to build, and then try building it. Along the way, you will run into new challenges that you wouldn’t have run into in a contrived tutorial or to-do app. Figuring out these challenges will help you dive deeper into the language/framework you are working in.

These are some of the ways I have used in order to alwaysBeLearning().