Becoming a front-end developer takes time, but what if you could double your productivity with just a
few simple habits. For most developers this seems a dream but it's actually quite simple. All you need
is the 11 tricks that I'm about to share with you and one of them is quite interesting. Tip number 3
will be to get you bored. Interested? Let's jump right into it. Becoming a front-end developer
indeed does take a lot of time. I've been doing this for more than 11 years. So here are my 11 tips
and tricks so you can become a better front-end developer and first one on the list is think
long term. You're in it for the long run. As I've been doing a lot of mentorings I've seen
a lot of developers taking it the shorter route. They want to have real immediate actionable
UI for example but that's not it. You have to go for the long run. You have to evolve you have to
learn you have to do this over the years and therefore you have to have the mentality to
do that. You just don't want to have a simple small little trick that you can have on that UI. You want
to understand how that UI works. You want to make sure that that UI will make sense and also it will
work after a few years also. Number two is embrace failure. Now you want to embrace failure because
you will definitely fail quite a lot. There will be bugs, there will be mistakes and what you want to
do is learn from them. You want to have a mentality that you want to fail as often as you can
most specifically at the beginning so you can learn quite a lot. Also make sure that you learn
from others. Take a look at other people's code, try to figure out how they might have messed up or why
it's not working as it should be. So make sure that you learn from your failures. Number three.
Get bored. Now this is interesting. Create an environment where you actually get
bored because we are constantly bombarded with information and we do not filter most of it.
We want to get bombarded with information, we do like interesting new stuff whether it's a scroll feed
or whatever interests our minds. So make sure whenever you start coding you will get into
a mindset where you are bored, you are not distracted. Therefore you will 100% focus on the job
at hand. Therefore you will learn quite a lot. So that's why you want to create an environment where
you are actually bored. Get bored. Number 4 read, then watch, then build and then teach or you
don't have to make sure that it's in this order but what I mean here is reading is a little bit
less than watching. Watching is a little bit less than building out apps what I'm talking about
is of course building apps and building apps is a little bit less than teaching them. So if you know
how to teach one concept, one particular thing that you are really accustomed to do go ahead and teach
it to somebody. First of all you will have that person and it will be really, really satisfying
and the person will be grateful, maybe they will help you out on some other project and second of
all you will have to distill your knowledge in a way that you can actually make that
thing understandable. You have to teach that new thing. So therefore you will know how that actual
concept or whatever UI you want to build out actually works under the hood. How it really, really
works. Now number 5. You want to get a mentor. Now I do have my own mentorship. It's a rebeloper.com/mentoring
where you can meet me on a one-on-one 60 minute Zoom call but why is mentorship so
important? Well it will cut out days if not months of your, I don't know tinkering, playing around,
trying to figure out stuff and most importantly you will have a guide. Now a guide is really
important because information is out there and it's quite a lot. You want to know what
you want to learn and how you want to learn it. And the mentor is a great way to do that.
Number 6. I'm calling this the five minute developer because we all have really busy lives.
Maybe you have a job and you are doing this as a side hustle. Maybe this is just a hobby for you.
You have family, you have other stuff to take care of maybe you have a pet. Maybe you want to travel.
So I have come up with this five-minute developer kind of thought where you all you have to do if
you have five minutes just go ahead and sit down and do some work. Learn something, build something,
watch YouTube video. Take a look at the tutorial or something like that. If you have five minutes
go ahead and grab those five minutes and yeah learn something new, build
something new. I often do this as I have a lot of meetings, I have a lot of work to do
if I have five minutes I go ahead and do whatever I can do to improve myself in five minutes, okay.
Number 7. Now as you most probably know I'm all about SwiftUI, this is
at the end of the day the channel about iOS development. I do love SwiftUI as a front end
developer tool, but you want to make sure that you don't get the hype only about SwiftUI.
You don't get just a button or a text view you want to make sure that you learn the fundamentals and
that's the data. Data drive SwiftUI, I would rather say that SwiftUI is basically data UI because data
is what carries all of the interactions, all of the UI changes from the data changes
therefore I would highly encourage you again to take a look at REBELOPER.COM/MENTORING where
I can teach you the real fundamentals of data in SwiftUI. Number 8. Do it every day. Now this
is no brainer, you have to be really consistent. Here comes in the five minute developer.
If you have five minutes a day then you can do this every day and I've been doing this each
and every day without, well maybe I skipped a few days in the last 11 years but I've been doing this
consistently and that really, really builds up. So do it every day. Number 9. Build your own tools.
Yes! Once you start take a look at tutorials, building out those tutorials and coming up
with some techniques you want to create your own tools because therefore you know how those
tools make your lives better. Of course you know what's troubling you, what that bug is or how
you think that you can make this even better or faster. Therefore you want to just create a simple
tool that will handle that and of course if you know that tool is really, really important it may
help the community do what I do. I just sell them on my site. It's at STORE.REBELOPER.COM. Go ahead
and check them out. There are a lot of tools. Just to name a few: Navigation, Toasts, routers. Go ahead
and check them out, maybe you have some ideas that you can build out your own. Okay! Number 10.
Get accountability. Now this is important because us developers it's kind of a lonely job.
We sit on the desktop and nothing really happens. We don't interact that much. So we kind of slack
off over time. That's where my community comes in. Go ahead and check it out it's a REBELOPER.COM/COMMUNITY
where you can be accountable and you can check on others also how they are doing because
this is a real powerful tool. If you say that you are going to build something out and you say
this to to someone for example that you care about, that you care about their opinion, you will fulfill
that promise of course and if you say that you are going to learn for example SwiftUI I don't know
two to three months, they will be there for you to check in how are you going with that
learning, okay. And finally number 11 and this is much about learning, a little bit more about
how to get better at learning how to code. And that's active recall and spaced repetition.
And before I dive into explaining what active recall and space repetition is I would like to
tell you that there's an app for that. It's called Anki. It's on the AppStore,
it does have a web version also. It's not sponsored, I do really like it. So active recall and space
repetition. Basically active recall what that means is that you want to actively recall what
you have learned. Take a look at some flash cards for example. If you write down your question and
on the other side you write down your answer after a while you take a look at the question
and you want to actively recall the answer for that question and Anki does a great job with that.
It does have these flash cards incorporated into them. Now space repetition means that let's say
you have a question and answer card there and you just leave it for one day. Now after one day
if you read the question and you know the answer then you are going to leave it for 3 days
and then 7 days, 14 days, maybe 16 days. It's like you just push it off till you
kind of memorize all of it. Now the cool part here comes when if you don't recall what you
want to learn. You don't know the actual answer. Well then you are back to square one. You put
it back to square one, let's say on day I don't know 14 you missed the answer, you don't really
recall that then put it back to day 1 and after one day you are just going to again
actively recall that answer. And those are the 11 tips that I highly recommend if you want to become
a front-end developer. Now if you did like this video go ahead and check out how you can add
subscriptions easily into your apps with the help of RevenueCat. The video is right over here.