I’m about to start working on the Advanced Algorithm challenges and hopefully be finishing up the front end stuff by the end of the year / early jan.
My goal is to get a full time position as a Junior Developer. With that being said, is it best to skip the Data Viz stuff and go straight to the Back End?
Any ideas or insights welcome!
Thanks
Sure. Do them in the order that is most interesting and/or valuable to you.
Hopefully you are already getting acquainted with the job scene in your area?
Carefully consider what is being asked for by your potential employers if getting hired is your priority at the moment. You’ll learn very different skills and technologies depending on which cert you attempt next.
Personally, I skipped Data Viz and went to Back end because that was more interesting to me and I wasn’t in a rush to get a job, but ymmv.
I approached it this way because I felt like I needed to get an understanding about back-end to decide which I would continue to focus on leading up to first job. First let me say, I’m glad I did, but… Many, including myself, feel the back-end curriculum at FCC is not so helpful in its current form. I took Learn and Understand NodeJS on Udemy, which was what ultimately helped me understand what was going on. My self-driven momentum hit a major speed-bump though, and I realized if I wanted to get proficient in one end faster and sooner, then personally that would be the front-end, which I find more interesting and relatable. After this, I took a Complete React Developer course on Udemy, and after getting through the gauntlet of excellent tutorials in this course (React, Redux, webpack, git, foundation, scss, testing with Mocha, Karma, Expect), I felt ready to start looking for work. (I paid about $15-17 for each of these courses thanks to finding coupons/waiting until udemy gave me a good offer).
The point I want to make with this post though is having learned a bit of back-end before doing web apps with advanced front-end frameworks helped me understand the bigger picture a lot better. Generally working with the these frameworks to build web apps, you’ll need to setup up a Node/Express server and be comfortable with the terminal. You’ll probably also work with some services like Firebase and deal with async javascript, so understanding this via Node will prepare you better.
I have a very similar question. I started my journey into web development in two months back, and now I have good grip at HTML, CSS and Vanilla Javascript. I would probably recieve the Front End Certification by the end of November. But I’m confused about my next stop.
Javascript landscape is so much diverse, should I be starting with Angular, React, Node or is there anything else I should jump upon first?
The JavaScript landscape is growing massively recently. What you should do next depends entirely on you. If its server side scripting you’re looking for I would recommend NodeJs. If it’s front end you’re after look at React or Angular. React is a lightweight library for building components, whereas Angular is a heavy duty framework for building applications. React will let you build applications as you see fit, while Angular have strong feelings about application architecture.
I will admit that I don’t know a lot about React, I’m much more familiar with Angular 1.X. I haven’t gotten around to learning Angular 2.X, but I’m hearing mixed reviews about it.
Another thing that you need to be aware of is how JavaScript is changing. The ES6 standard is here and brings massive improvements to core JavaScript functionality, but its not supported by most browsers yet, so if you want to use that, you’ll need to learn how to transpile it down to ES5 JavaScript using Babel or some other tool.
It all depends totally on you and what you want to learn (and of course, where you want to work). I would recommend doing some research on each library/framework before committing to it. Good Luck!
Thanks a lot 
Start with angular. Angular 2 is following Ecmascript of 2016 …17 . Harder to understand with new Class structures imports and all that.
but idea of Angular is straight forward and simple. Better to learn angular 2 ,but there isn’t really good book or tutorial.
I ended up doing the same thing. I’m looking forward to the Data Vis, especially the rogue-like game as I’ve been programming games for a long time now, but I really want to learn backend. I finished the Voting App project and used HyperDev to host it. It was suggested as an alternative to Heroku by @QuincyLarson, it’s still in beta though. My web app has a very simple front end but I learned so much from this first project. I’ve actually been able to answer questions and help people in the nodejs chat. Feel free to hit me up for any help. If you want to check my app out: https://fcc-voting-app-rl.hyperdev.space
Ryan