Is FCC Still Right For Me If I Don't Like Front End Development?

Hey, everyone! Facing somewhat of a dilemma.

I’ve been through various front end development courses, including the brief introduction to HTML/CSS on here, and I’ve realized that I find HTML/CSS incredibly boring. I don’t enjoy creating navs, footers, and dealing with tons of divs. Proper spacing between elements on the site is a consistent headache for me, especially when it comes to proper utilization of the box model. Typography and colors are something that always, always confound me. More often than not I find myself incredibly frustrated and un-engaged when dealing with HTML and CSS. It feels like I need to have an artistic eye to make it work, and I just don’t seem to have one.

What I do seem to enjoy is JavaScript programming itself. I like writing in it, I like solving interesting problems with it such as the ones I’ve encountered in interviews. I like the programming aspect, it seems. It feels a lot like solving a puzzle.

Is FreeCodeCamp right for me if I don’t enjoy creating websites? Is it possible to earn jobs on just JavaScript knowledge alone, or will I always need to use it in tandem with HTML/CSS? Or at least get a job with where I work very little with it?

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From what I read, you should read more about Backend stuff. Freecodecamp does cover that, thought it’s more in the end of it’s curriculum and have far less exercices than the Frontend part.

But remember that Javascript is the language of the Web, and is always, if not, tied to HTML/CSS. Backend does not have to deal with this, but it’s still a part of website/application development.

You could consider learning another language that is closer to your needs, like Python or Ruby, which are quite easy to learn !

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Hi @RodShark yes I believe so.

If you search Codepen for FreeCodeCamp submissions you will see the artistic side of student’s work are all over the map. Some students go to great lengths to give their webpages amazing amounts of details and they are quite beautiful. Other students are much more interested in the code behind the scenes and their webpage may be quite basic, but still perform beautifully.

FreeCodeCamp will allow you to pursue what you are most interested in. You still will need to construct a basic webpage to display your work, but it can be very basic but still demonstrate you completed the programming assignment.

By the way, to answer your last point, everyone in this business needs to understand at least the basics of HTML and CSS, you cannot really expect to do javascript code development without it. Your javascript code needs that context to be useful and make sense.

But there are other fields. Game development maybe? Application development? You might need to explore languages other than javascript, but if pure coding is your passion it is worth considering.

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I work as a front-end developer and I rarely write HTML or CSS at work. I spend most of my time developing front-end functionality in js. You have to know HTML and CSS of course, it’s the foundation of our work. I think getting some practice using both techniques is a good idea, but after that you can focus on what you want to do.

That being said, you can’t really avoid dealing with HTML/CSS sometimes, not even in backend development. I often fiddle around with code that dynamically adds or changes elements or styles that won’t work as intended on browser a / os b. I can easily spend an hour trying to understand why it doesn’t work and get annoyed. That’s part of the job :~)

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