Guide to navigating your career as a frontend engineer

This is an essay like version of my presentation at Rendercon Kenya 2023

Learning the smart way

• Before diving into anything, figure out your learning style and how to learn better. Being a developer is constantly learning new things. Knowing how you learn, makes you better and faster at understanding things.
• The current education system teaches you how to be a good at regurgitation, system in and out. Very little critical thinking and arguing concepts from a first principles perspective. I literally got through my last two years of university by going through past papers and knowing how to answer the questions in there. Nothing about understanding the core concepts of the units.
• You don’t have to finish that book/course. Once you get what you were looking for, it’s okay to move on. Knowing when to quit early is a good skill.

Reading a good book for the second time is much better than reading 10 average books. Shane Parrish

• Just in time information is better than just in case information. Most people just consume information when they come across it. In reality, if you don’t need that information at that moment, then you are “wasting” time that could be spent on something more important. Knowing what to not to learn is also important.
• Learning while doing preventing overworking but underperforming - Source

It is remarkable how much long-term advantage people like us have gotten by trying to be consistently not stupid, instead of trying to be very intelligent. Charlie Munger

Fundamentals and First Principle Thinking

• Build a rock solid foundation of the fundamentals
• Use frameworks and mental models as guides. Every best practise was once just an opinion
• You can adapt when you see new problems — problem-solving super power

Tap into community brilliance

• If you can, build in public
• Learn to read code because that’s what you’ll be doing most of the time
• Conference talks are a gold mine. Some of my major aha moments are from conference talks
• Someone put in 100 hours in package building something complicated so you don’t have to.

Tools should be enablers, not annoyances

• Be a master of your tools.
• Type faster and use keyboard shortcuts. Way faster than using the mouse
• The whole idea is to able to bring your ideas into a reality as fast as possible.