As I continue my journey into becoming a Frontend Developer, my current goals are simple:
- Designing beautiful layouts.
- Coding semantically concise web pages.
- Finishing as many projects as I can.
- Finding a company where I can learn and grow.
Designing beautiful layouts and code clean semantically perfect webpages. I look to Behance and AAAwards.com to get a lot of my design inspirations from; If you’re familiar with Austin Kleon’s Steal Like An Artist, then you probably know where I’m going with this. There’s nothing new under the sun and I don’t often worry about designing as much as I used to. For a couple of years now I’ve been able to adopt other styles and steal what I like and use it as my own. I pretty much worry about the coding part these days, it takes time to get better, which is why I look at other sites and inspect their code. I literally just said there’s nothing new under the sun, so it helps me learn and plus, I need to know what I’m shooting for.
Finishing projects is a lot easier said than done, I can sometimes fixate on the details that I end up taking a lot longer time to complete a project than needed to. I don’t see it as a waste of time, I like experimenting and at the end of the day I want to be able to say I gave it the time it deserved. I’m also aware that I need to finish projects, the more projects completed, the more experience, the more I can show off in my portfolio. Nothing is perfect, I’m slowly adopting the strategy of just finishing. A mantra that I got from Jake Parker (the creator of Inktober) “Finished not perfect” definitely repeats in the back of my mind when I start something new.
You can view that video here: https://youtu.be/lRtV-ugIT0k.
I haven’t decided where I would like to work, but it’s important I’m able to learn and grow at that company. I love to learn and it’s one of the reasons why I chose web development, it’s always improving and constantly changing. It’s the perfect mix of design and technical skills; pretty much the perfect job for me. Finding a company where I get that perfect blend would make me happy, a goal is finding where I can do both equally and not have to do one more than the other. Not sure if that company exists, it’s probably why freelancing seems so attractive. I would get to do both, but I would also have to wear many different hats in order to run my own successful business. Something I’m not too sure I want to do, projects here and there are fine, but fulltime and depending on freelancing as my main income, it’s scary. I know where my strengths lie and it’s being able to focus on the work rather than the business part, I would be better suited at a smaller company, especially in the early part of my career while I’m learning.