A month into my front-end full time job! help!

Hello all

Decided to come here for help and a general update.

It has been a month and I am learning so much. I absolutely LOVE the work. How we do things, the office life. It is completely new to me. But this month I have some major ups and downs. Confidence boosts and major imposter syndrome downs too.

It has taken me about this long to get used to how we do things, I have pretty much got it, How we build things. They way they like it done. Mastered git and got used to software packages and even dabbled in some creative too:)

The few two weeks were great, nice and steady. Given amends and editing some templates. We do ALOT of marketing emails, so took me a few weeks to get my around nested tables, Campaign Montior, Email on Acid and testing compatibility etc. All is great on that end. But thats the easy stuff. I have been absolutely hammering myself on working my ass off. It is a entry level role, that being said I did not want to constantly pester the senior/mid devs too much about silly things I could get my head round on my own.

Great, got my head round it, blended well with the small dev team we have. Confidence growing strong. I felt so proud and happy. YES! I did it, all my hard work at home finally paying off. Then I get a PSD conversion. Not a marketing email. Using anything I like.

This is great. The reason I wanted to do this in the first place. I got the PSD, looks really nice and sleek design. Pretty and everything was arranged really nicely. Box Model perfect. Wanted it responsive! Even better, show off some of my FCC skills learned and try to impress. I am only entry level after all:) I soon realised in my excitement that I forgot the fact I have never worked off a psd design before. Pixel perfectly. Then I see how long they have estimated. 4 hours. Honestly I spent the 4 hours trying to do the hero banner… It was a background image, with more images placed at seemingly strange places. Play button in the middle, Logos offset left-top and right middle. I realised quickly I have never worked with images on-top of images before either. The positioning, especially when making it responsive I really struggled with. I really lost alot of confidence, imposter syndrome. Should I be doing this. These other guys can do it in 4 hours.

I took it home over the weekend, spent 8 hours doing it. I was determined to do it. Long story short I did! Monday came round. Client loved the result. I loved the result. Boss loved the result. Even the senior creative designer gave my the nod of approval. So many ups and downs it is unreal.

Anyway a week goes by…emails again, nice and easy for a change. How things have changed haha! I feel more stressed and pushed though, because I am constantly at it. I think maybe I am trying to hard. So just a week of emails and amends, a bit more creative. Busy, very busy. They are not holding back the amount of work anymore. Feels good confidence grows. I can do this. Boss says im doing well, has no concerns at all.

Then today I get given a update. Senior dev comes over, sets up MAMP, php and MYSQL gave me rights to all sorts of stuff. All I have to do is add 2 new pages to a CMS. Clone the repo check it all out. Job should of taken maybe 3 hours? Senior dev is waiting for me to do my front end thing so he can code the logic back-end. I was completely lost. Couldn’t understand how the site was even set up. Routing, controller, page. It’s all in PHP. FCC gave me a really good fundamental knowledge of JS so I can read it, roughly and know (roughly) what it’s doing.

I have to ask the senior dev to walk me through the site how I can to the nav bar, can’t find it anywhere. How to add the two pages to routing then the controller then pages (whisky framework apparently) I felt completely out of my league. Completely lost and felt absolutely useless. Senior dev kindly shows me around, tells me once how to do it, then I try and do it. But the worst part of it all. After I sat there and created the 2 pages…i.e just made 2 empty routed pages. He just sat and watched me to the front-end. It was just making 2 forms, adding a button, a full size hero. But laying it out and styling it to a psd. But I completely lost it. It was bootstrap too, I know bootstrap. No problem. I just lost it.

Never really had to style a form before, could not get the two check boxes and labels in line, could’nt get input text to stack properly. Let alone color or style it as in the psd. Never had to trawl through so much css to find out what classes do. I feel bad asking the senior dev anything basic front-end related. How would you style these as they are in the psd? etc. Because I know NOTHING back end and realised I actually know very little on web dev in general.

I can code a project, I can do JS,I can make my own things using bootstrap or css grid. I can make a random quote gen, JS calc, Weather API, Portfolio. But can I do the work thats given to me? If its anything but emails, seems like I really struggle. I am hammering myself after work too. The devs I am with 5+ years experience. I have 5months maybe 6 including experience here. I finish work. I eat shower, get home and do Colt Steeles Web Dev bootcamp, or do work stuff at home. Just to know I can do it and get it done.

TL:DR

Struggling with work lately, get given things I have not done before, struggle at first, feel down and feel like a fraud, do it, feel amazing. Rinse Repeat! Do I speak to my boss? The last thing I want to do is jack the job in. I like it. I like coding, I never ever thought I would have a job like this. It’s a dream. But I feel so stupid and inadequate sometimes. I SHOULD know how to position two checkboxes and labels… I DO KNOW… I should know how to stack things correctly in bootstrap. I have done it numerous times before…On my OWN projects. When something specific is asked, specific positioning for example I can’t do it. Help please! I have come this far…

2 Likes

Hello friend,
I speak with honesty and love…ok… really…but I have to be honest with you…

CALM THE HELL DOWN…!!! TAKE A FREAKING BREATH…

Firstly, there is a reason they are giving you more advanced tasks. They don’t want you to be the email person. They want you to learn things.

This is where you take your work home with you. Learn your psd to html work flow a little better.

You already know half the problem, you just lost it. That’s all it was. If you can look at the problem and say, opps that’s where I messed up, then you know where you need to start.

You can build stuff, you can do it. They would not have hired you otherwise. Just keep studying

Btw…css is a never ending hell beast…it can never be masterd…only tamed…bootstrap helps alot. If you are allowed ntonuse that do so.

You mention bootstrap a lot, perhaps you could do well to practice plain CSS in your free time. Get familiar with some basic tricks with css to align elements consistently.

It will be difficult and stressful at the start… maybe even slow going. It’s just part of the process. With more experience and more practice, speed will come naturally.

Also, when you’re too stressed out, your brain short circuits and you go gaga, and forget/can’t remember sometimes the simplest of things. So relax.

And some things are naturally forgotten by the brain if you don’t use it often enough. So practicing and using a language/framework/package/etc. more often is the only antidote from completely forgetting it. – and you don’t completely forget it anyway, sometimes a quick review of the documentation is enough to get you going again.

Thanks for listening and letting me vent!

I decided to take the weekend off from coding, from learning from anything computer related:) Some breathing time. And it’s done me a world of good. From Tuesday I will be picking up some more CSS too!

It has a been a very busy month, but in hindsight, It has been very very amazing too! Im glad I am not the “email guy”.