Going into second years of pandemic and quarantine, things started really strong. Implied from my first name, I turned 24 in early 2021, and my favorite football team, Arsenal FC, going into 2021 at position 13 in the table.

Here some of the things that I might have done differently if I had known earlier.

Buy SHIB and DOGE in January.

Might have already bought a house by the end of the year.

Learn CSS as hard as you learn JavaScript.

No matter how performant or how fast your website is, if it's unpleasing to the user eye then they won't stay for a long period on your website.

Write what you learned.

Learning by watching is the easiest way of learning, but it isn't the best way of actually remember what you learned. Write down what you learn. If it's a tutorial, then do the code along, if it's implementation of something, then try to implement it. Doesn't matter if you implement it for simple thing, as long as you try using it you'll get better at it then not using it at all.

Start actually writing.

"I'll write it later when I can write better" this is a paradoxial statement. You won't get better at writing unless you started doing it. Your writing might not be as eloquent or concise as others, it's enough as long as you understand it.

Become web developer first, then front-end developer.

Before light there was darkness. Before front-end developer there was web developer, or something along that line. My biggest mistake as front-end developer was going head first straight into the meaty part of front-end.

I started learning react before I fully understand JavaScript, and I started learning JavaScript before I fully understand why would web need JavaScript, and so on, mistake after mistake. I don't think that it was a catastropic or anything, it's just I always understand better when I learning something from ground up. And somehow I just don't do it in the early time when I learn React. I don't understand what React brings to the web ecosystem since I don't fully understand the ecosystem itself. I don't fully understand where is React belong to in the web, and why it belongs there.

I'm a changed man, I've started backtracking my learning process, when I don't understand why something is doing something, I'll take a time to find the answer for it. I know there is magic in technology, where you can only accept things the way that they are, but that technology wasn't just brought down from the sky, there are people behind it who thought about it and made that technology exist.

Learn the basic of SEO.

You made a website and it's beautiful, but you don't give a single care about Search Engine Optimization.

"What's meta tag? If I don't see it then I don't need it" -the naive me back then.

I don't know whether this thought is common or not among early front-end developer, but it sure is common to me. When you made something and release it to the public, then you might as well let the masses know. And what do the masses do when they want to know something? Yes, they search for it. Starting to see the pattern? Search, Search Engine Optimization, does those thing related? You better bet they do.

When your website is optimized for Search Engine it will appears a lot higher in the search results. When it appears higher it will gain more exposure to the masses. We all know that only desperate people visit page number 2 on Google Search. Therefore optimize your website so they appear in page number 1. There are a lot of ways to have a better SEO, as for Google, you can register your website at their search console. Your page will be indexed, good stuff. You can be more descriptive on your meta tag, so that the robot that will index your website knows what your site is all about. At least I do those two. You can always do more than two though.

Find a Senior.

I decided to become a front-end developer without actually having someone that I know that excels on this field. And that affect me on how I learned thing. I basically don't know where to start or when to stop. It's just rabbit hole after rabbit hole and tunnel visioned after tunnel visioned. And it's tiring. There are way too many things to learn. You will never feel enough when you realize this. You don't have to understand everything, at least you understand how to read docs.

So what did I do? I look for online Senior. I followed some people that's well known or at least having a job as front-end developer. It's not the best way but this helps me. I read their blog post, I read what they share, and if they have an open source project I'll watch their codebase and learning their approach on how they solve their problem. I also suggest picking a good well fleshed out course that explain things from ground up. You may need to pay some, but it's a good investment regardless.

Don't wait until you're ready.

“If we wait until we're ready, we'll be waiting for the rest of our lives.” ― Lemony Snicket

I personally find this quote true to some degree. Apart from learning and doing freelance, as of now I'm still on job hunting. There was a time in my life when LinkedIn is my bestfriend. We all do, and it's not something to be ashamed of. But have you ever looked at a job requirements and see a bunch of things you don't have any idea at all except maybe for the first two or three requirements. I've been there, maybe more than once. And it throws down my confident level by a lot.

"I struggled so much understanding the first two or three requirements, and what in the world is the rest of this requirements. I don't even qualify for all of the requirements, why bother. I'll just learned it first and apply when I'm ready".

Requirements often makes me hesitant to even trying to apply. But that is a big mistake. Job requirements tend to expect you as a superhuman being who have 5 or 6 years of experience on technology that just started getting popular 2 years ago. I learned it the hard way when my friend told me that someone being accepted in his company when that person doesn't even understand the language used on that company.

Here's my .02, start doing interviews, if you get the job then congratulations. But if you don't, and you choke on answering the interview questions, then congratulations, someone just gave you the next direction to take for your learning journey.