I’ve seen hundreds of junior frontend developers' resumes. In an average recruitment process, we get 80 candidates for one job.

What makes us pick you?

The sad truth is you have to stand out. If there’s nothing special about your skills or experience, you have to be lucky to get a job. And relying on luck is not a reliable tactic.

Fortunately, it’s not that hard to stand out. Most of the resumes are like carbon copies. The candidates finished the same bootcamps or online courses. They have similar projects. Sometimes, even their portfolio pages are indistinguishable.

Here are a…

Learning frontend is hard. The field is growing fast and it’s easy to get lost in the dozens of frameworks, libraries, and tools. To grow as a frontend developer, you have to cut through the noise and focus on the essential things.

Here are five tricks that worked for me in my journey from layman to a frontend developer.

1. Make a Plan

You know your goal: become the best front-end developer possible. To achieve it, you have to make a plan. …

It was a judgment day. I had been working on a feature for the last month. That afternoon, my team was to present the work to the CEO.

I felt fairly confident. The day before, a tester reported a few minor bugs — some obvious things to fix during my morning coffee.

One task was to show the companies' logos in a table. Fair enough. But it was weird. I felt like I had fixed it earlier. I even wondered how I could mess up simple logic.

Well, the only one who doesn’t make mistakes is the one who does…

Do you believe in unicorns?

I do.

I’ve seen them. Real frontend unicorns. The people who learned much faster than everyone else. The people who focused all their effort where it could provide the most value. The people who stand out.

Unfortunately, I wasn’t one of them. It took me way too long to learn frontend development. I’ve made more mistakes than I could count.

Yet, I got there. I’m a professional frontend developer for more than 5 years.

And I want you to succeed too. Succeed and don’t repeat my mistakes.

So I reached out to my friends. We…

You may be the greatest software developer in your company and not get promoted. You may build the greatest applications in your market and still not get enough freelance projects. You may be the best candidate for a programming position and still not get a job.

To be successful during your career, you need more. You need to be able to cooperate with others, provide value, and grow.

These essential non-technical skills will help you thrive and expand your career.

Social Skills

Social skills is a term describing many ideas, but in its essence, it is two things: the ability to communicate…

What do you do when you hear about a new hot thing in programming?

If you’re like me, you probably read a bit and quickly decide it sounds cool. You bookmark a few websites and maybe add them to the learning to-do list.

Sometimes you may even learn — watch a few tutorials, skim the documentation, play with it.

Usually, before you can master it, the new shiny thing appears, and your attention shifts.

The conclusion is simple — there are just too many things to learn; how could you master it all?

You can’t.

You don’t have unlimited time…

Napoleon Bonaparte famously said:

“For war we need three things — money, money and more money.”

It resembles what you need to learn to program — to code, code, and code some more. That’s the only viable way to get better.

You probably already know that, and maybe you’ve been coding for years. But I bet sometimes you get stuck. You may be involved in a long project with few challenges or still looking for a job and not knowing how to stand out from the crowd.

Whatever it is, it feels like you’re coding more and more and can’t…

This is not advice on how to get a FAANG job or working for another huge company. Big companies have complex recruitment processes and need different approaches.

This is advice on how to find one of the millions of software developer jobs at smaller companies.

The advice is simple: Look for the company you want to work for and apply there — even if it’s not recruiting.

My Story

I’m a self-taught software developer. In 2015, I quit my job and bet on learning to code. After ten months, I had spent most of my savings and had no job.

I felt…