How important is data viz? What about CSS animation?

I was wondering getting a job as a front end/ full stack how important is visualization? i recall the estimated time was around 200 hours of study.

Same question about cs3 animation, i’ve seen stuff that is borderline designer skills.

Getting a job is hard. You should know as many things as possible. Of course some jobs specialize in certain things. But most jobs require you to have at least some broad knowledge. And the more you know, the more jobs open up to you. Just learn.

Speaking from my own experience of looking for a job via Indeed and LinkedIn Jobs over the past year, I’ve rarely seen job postings mention either D3.js or CSS3 animation for front-end developer positions. Nowadays, the most common libraries/frameworks that I see are React and Angular, and Vue.js less often. As far as CSS, the main thing you should learn for a dev position is a preprocessor like Sass, which seems to be more popular than Less.

I’d say if your intent is solely front-end, then you should probably learn those, but if you’d prefer to focus equally on front-end and back-end for full-stack, you can safely ignore them. From the recently updated curriculum, the main section you should focus on is “JSON APIs and Ajax”, since that’s usually how front-ends communicate to back-ends.

As far as learning back-end, not every company uses Node.js + Express, and the ones that do tend to be smaller companies—i.e., usually very small companies that typically have less than even 50 people. I’d recommend spending some time looking for jobs in your area and seeing what the most popular and most-mentioned technologies are, particularly for the companies that you’re most interested in working at, because you could very well be wasting your time learning back-end JavaScript, if most of the companies in your area are using something else, like .NET, Ruby on Rails, PHP, or Java. Well, .NET isn’t exactly that popular and it tends to be used more by larger companies, and RoR is used more by smaller companies, but I have been noticing an upward trend of .NET recently (so far in 2018 that is), mostly thanks to .NET Core.

Also, although FCC focuses on the full JavaScript stack including MongoDB, in my job search I’ve rarely seen companies that are actually using it. SQL relational databases are far more prevalent, so it’d be well worth the time to learn the language and one of the systems (MySQL, PostgreSQL, or SQL Server).

I’d highly recommend putting a small amount of time into looking for jobs in your area (no need to apply, but look at their requirements) before spending any additional time on learning anything further—and deciding what kind of companies you want to work at, let alone individual companies.

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Thanks. my end goal is to mainly backend .net work if possible but i see the front end stuff helping me present my work. i remember at uni spending months working on a eCommerce project. All the function works but the design looks like its from the 1990s

@astv99 you seem to be working in the field, i was wondering about a copyright issue about small snippets, lets say i need pop-up pop i would go see examples, from what i read the small block of code is copyrighted, but there is only so many ways to combine css and java script to make a pop up box.

With .NET, just keep in mind that could limit your potential job options somewhat compared to more “agnostic” tech stacks, since not too many companies tend to invest heavily into Microsoft technologies. But if you already know that, I’m guessing you’re either looking to work at Microsoft or other similarly large companies.

I wouldn’t say I’m working in the field, I just read a lot about tech (and have been learning myself) and started seriously looking for a dev job early last year. I don’t know anything about copyrights, but a few lines of code from a tutorial is probably ok—most code snippets won’t end up working just dropped in anyway and you’ll need to modify something. And it wouldn’t hurt to cite your sources either, especially if your source is StackOverflow.

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Don’t worry about either. Data visualisation is not a fundamental skill and if you need a chart, just use a library. CSS animations are fun to play around with, and its worth learning a few basic methods (fade ins are very useful) to give your portfolio a nice professional finish.

The worst thing you can do is go overboard on your portfolio and fill it with 90s-style whizzy animations. It will make you look like a complete amateur.

Focus on the fundamentals - building a full stack CRUD app with responsive design and authentication. If you want something extra, I highly recommend learning SQL - still the world’s most sought-after programming language.

Whaaaat?

There are about a gazillion .NET jobs. It’s about as mainstream as technology gets.

I’m sure there are a ton of .NET jobs around the country, but I was speaking more to its prevalence compared to other tech stacks that I’ve observed, based on my local area, with the assumption that other areas might be similar (however correct or incorrect that might be).

I’m in the Denver metro area, which has a relatively strong Microsoft presence (MS has offices in both Boulder and Denver), and there are plenty of local companies using the Microsoft stack (C#/.NET w/ and w/o Angular) too. However, there are far more local companies here that aren’t using the Microsoft stack and are using a different language/framework on the back-end—whether that’s Ruby (RoR), JavaScript (Node.js), PHP (primarily Laravel but I’ve also seen others), Python (Django), or Java (Spring). RoR has probably the strongest presence in the area compared to the others, although Node.js, Spring, and the PHP frameworks (and CMSes) are fairly prevalent as well.