Considerations Moving Forward?

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I’ve recently completed the Responsive Web Design and JavaScript Algorithms and Data Structures sections, and am now into Front End Libraries. I’ve completed the Bootstrap and jQuery sections, with further practice from a different self-learning course.

The process I’ve used up to this point is to complete the FCC curriculum in order, supplementing the lessons with information found on external sites. I did this a little bit with the CSS section, and a lot more with the JS section. In fact, I probably spent more time learning JS in bits and pieces through external sites than on FCC. I like this style of learning, because it forces me to go out and find information. The FCC curriculum has been a good guide.

My question is: how should I move forward from here? Given my current position in the FCC curriculum, should I be looking at learning other things while progressing through the next few sections within Front End Libraries?

For example, I know that becoming proficient with the command line and Git will be critical to becoming a competent web developer. Up to now, the FCC challenges and projects have been completed either in the FCC code editor, or through CodePen. Will the FCC curriculum eventually teach me how to create a workflow that approximates what an actual developer uses in his/her daily work?

I actually completed the JS algorithms and projects in local files saved to my computer and edited through VSCode, opening them in a browser, then pasting the full code in the FCC editor. Although I know this is inefficient, I don’t yet know how to improve that workflow.

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Not really, because that could be anything, tbh. See, this:

That’s fine. You are imagining a “real” developer workflow is something hugely different? Normally you would not need to manually copy the code itself and paste it into an online UI as a last step, but tbh that isn’t exactly a rare thing to need to do.

Main difference is that much of what you’re doing is a manual process. Manual processes generally:

a. will cause serious errors to creep in pretty quickly and
b. are annoying and boring, and hopefully are automatable.

Writing tests for your code (taking the ones from the challenges as as a starting point) would be a very sensible step from here.

In turn that will mean you want to look at basic tooling, which needs basic command line skills. “Use the command line” basically just means “how to execute programs by typing commands instead of clicking buttons”, and you don’t need to know much at first. Just follow instructions online for the things you need, and write down the commands for reference. You’ll pick things up naturally.

In turn you may lead to wanting to save a record of versions of your work, which, practically, mean git. Again, you just need very basics (like maybe 5 commands?

So you kinda see it’s a gradual thing.

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