How to be Extraordinary: Resources for the Discerning Front-end Developer

Posted by dave on

At work, I participate in a lot of candidate interviews for our open positions. If you do a lot of interviews, you know that the knowledge and skill level of candidates varies greatly. It’s hard to ever quantify exactly what you are looking for in a candidate, but from a technical perspective I think it’s useful to know what an extraordinary candidate would look like. Having this ideal in mind can help focus your questions and quickly determine the technical level of the candidate.

I tend to categorize a candidate’s knowledge into four levels: never heard of it, heard of it, tried it, know it. With this in mind, I started putting together a list of skills that I would want an ideal front-end candidate to have so that I could properly judge their skills.

In doing, I realized that I don’t even have all of these fine skills and I expect that probably no one on my team does either. In all likelihood, you don’t have all of these skills either. This should bother you! You should want to be the best you can possibly be. It’s not about just knowing enough to get the job done. Our industry changes to fast too settle with what you know now.

Take a look at this list of resources and make yourself better!

Articles you should read

Books you should read

Techniques/tools you should get familiar with

Sass/Compass

Mobile First, Responsive Web Design

Git and Github

Object Oriented CSS

Javasript Unit Testing

Javascript Templating

Vertical Rhythm and Modular Scale

Advanced CSS Selectors

BEM (Block, Element, Modifier)

Performance

Accessibility