What is Frontend Development anyway?

Front-end development primarily focuses on user experience. Using the related coding and design techniques, you as front-end developers build the elements of an application that are directly accessed by end-users with a goal of rendering the entire interface elegant, easy to use, fast, and secure, fostering user engagement and interaction.

Programming languages for the Frontend

Front-end development is the development of visual and interactive elements of a website that users interact with directly. It's a combination of HTML, CSS and JavaScript, where HTML provides the structure, CSS the styling and layout, and JavaScript the dynamic behaviour and interactivity.

We should pause for a moment to clarify the differences between a front end developer, back end developer, and full stack developer. Let’s put this in simple terms: a front end developer is responsible for the parts of an app or website that users see and interact with. A back end developer takes care of the “behind the scenes” matters such as infrastructure and databases. The full-stack developer is a mixture of both, a jack of all trades that can handle the whole design process from the beginning to the end.
Note that there’s a trend these days where the line between the front end and back end development has been blurring. Primarily since many of the tasks that fall in the domain of back end developers are being increasingly handled by the front end developers.
As a final aside, there are also full-stack engineers. They are full-stack developers who have project management experience, adept at disciplines in the configuring, managing, and maintaining computer networks and systems.

You can make relatively simple changes to your site using Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) to change colors and the look-and-feel of various interface components, replacing images, and other relatively cosmetic changes. For more advanced styling, familiarity with LESS (Leaner Style Sheets) and XML (Extensible Markup Language) is helpful.

No structural changes are made to pages—you accept the structure of the site provided by default by modules you load on to your site.

This can be a good starting point for a site as it requires the least effort and knowledge.

Some people hold themselves accountable by logging work on productivity apps, while others turn to blogs and books inspirational productivity quotes. Regardless of how you motivate yourself to get things done in the workplace, now and then we all find ourselves searching for productivity tips to keep us moving forward. And if you don’t think this applies to you, consider this: research suggests that in an eight-hour workday, the average worker is only productive for two hours and 53 minutes. That leaves a lot of room for improvement.

Before you do anything else, take a few moments at the start of each day to organize and declutter your workspace. A clutter-free environment helps you think more clearly and produce better results, said Kristoph Matthews, head of engineering at NewtonX and founder of on-demand storage company Boxbee. By cleaning up and organizing your space, you can greatly increase your productivity and limit the time you spend searching for items.

Color can have a major effect on your mood and productivity throughout the day, said Jenny Gauld, interior designer for office furniture and accessory retailer Turnstone. Blue can impart a calming feeling and help you focus, while red may be great for work requiring accuracy and attention to detail. Plants can also help people focus: A study by the American Society for Horticultural Science found that workers who were exposed to plants in their workspace reported feeling less stressed and more productive.

In addition to adding some color and plants to your workspace, decorating your desk or cubicle with a few personal knickknacks can help you feel more relaxed, which can boost your productivity. Gauld suggested adding meaningful career memorabilia, such as diplomas, awards, and other decorative items that help you feel appreciated and will motivate you.

Everyone has at least one task on the to-do list that keeps getting pushed back because the thought of doing it seems awful. That task is actually the one you should complete first, according to Matthews. Instead of waiting until the last minute to finish it, get it off your plate as soon as possible. Your other tasks will seem less daunting by comparison, and you’ll stop stressing about that one task all day, making you more productive overall.

People vary in terms of when they are most productive. For example, are you a morning person or a night owl? It’s important to identify which hours of the day you feel most alert and attentive, and then dedicate those hours to your most important tasks. This is especially useful if you work remotely and can determine your schedule.

If you can’t create a schedule around your most productive work time, consider organizing your priorities in your current schedule based on which hours of your workday you feel most alert. Your productivity peaks are often in 90- to 120-minute intervals.

Whether it’s taking a walk, going to your favorite coffee shop, reading a magazine or visiting with a colleague, taking short breaks that are unrelated to your work can make a huge difference in your performance. Your productivity diminishes the longer you go without a break. Kobel explained that this is why it’s recommended that people don’t work more than eight to 10 hours per day. At a certain point, she said, your body and mind simply cannot produce anymore.

Exercise isn’t just good for your body; it can also positively impact your work performance. Physical exercise has been shown to affect mental health and focus, said Sam McIntire, founder of Deskbright, an online learning platform dedicated to helping entrepreneurs and employees. A great way to feel sharper and more productive? Try going for a run in the morning or starting your day with a workout, McIntire suggested. It doesn’t hurt to sneak in some exercise on your breaks either.

It’s not always easy to keep track of everything you need to do, so start each morning by writing down your goals for the day. When your focus is broken or you find yourself procrastinating, McIntire said, you can use the list to keep you on track, said McIntire. He suggested writing your list down on a Post-it or something that’s visible from your desk, then returning to it when you need a reminder of what you should be working on.

Doing more than one thing at a time may seem like the best way to get all of your tasks done, but it can hurt your productivity more than it helps. Multitasking simply doesn’t work, and when you do it, you end up wasting time, Kobel said.

It can be hard to improve your productivity. These easy tips can help you be more productive without a herculean effort.

1. 1.

   Create a workspace that is clean, comfortable, decorative and free from distractions.

2. 2.

   It can be helpful to take short breaks, move around, switch locations, put on some music, meditate and eat lunch with your co-workers.

3. 3.

   Create daily goals and to-do lists to prioritize and delegate your tasks efficiently.

What is Gatsby anyway?

Gatsby is a meta-framework built on top of React that specializes in producing fast-loading, fully interactive Jamstack sites. It’s popular for its extensive plugin ecosystem, powerful integrations with virtually any API and data source, excellent documentation, and pleasant developer experience.

Because Gatsby is a meta-framework on top of React, there are very few limitations to what you can build with it — if you can build it with React, you can most likely build it with Gatsby. However, Gatsby adds powerful features on top of React that improve developer experience, site performance, and overall shipping velocity.

It’s another static site generator like Hugo, Jekyll and so on. So what makes it special? Why are we talking specifically about it?

Gatsby can be used to build static sites that are Progressive Web Apps, follow the latest web standards, and are optimized to be highly performant. It makes use of the latest and popular technologies including ReactJS, Webpack, GraphQL, modern ES6+ JavaScript and CSS.

Gatsby allows you to bring your data from anywhere.

Probably the largest draw for Gatsby is its ability to load data from virtually any data source into a uniform data layer. A thriving ecosystem of source plugins give you the power to integrate with SaaS solutions and third-party tools with minimal configuration and API support for adding any custom data to Gatsby’s data layer mean you’re able to build websites with a uniform developer experience no matter where the data comes from.

This means your team doesn’t have to choose between a pleasant content management system for content managers or a pleasant workflow for developers — you can use whatever tools you like best for managing content and developers are able to build sites with it using a modern React and GraphQL workflow.

One of the first things about Gatsby that impressed me was its plugin system. Like many other OSS tools such as webpack and Babel, much of the power of Gatsby is provided by plugins. And that's a good thing. Its plugin architecture allows for incredibly deep integrations into almost every aspect of Gatsby: build configuration, data extraction and transformation, the build process, the browser at runtime, etc. This system has allowed not only the core Gatsby team to create powerful plugins, but the community to create equally powerful plugins as well. If there's a task you're looking to accomplish with Gatsby, odds are there is already a plugin for it. And if not, there's plenty of documentation to help you get started writing one.

With any website, one needs to have data/content injected into markup to generate HTML. With static site generators, this usually involves writing Markdown files adjacent to template files that get merged together in some way at build time. Gatsby takes a different approach by providing a data fetching abstraction layer between your data/content and your templates. This brings about a huge paradigm shift both in how data is accessed in the templates as well as from where data can be pulled.

With Gatsby, the entirety of your site's data is accessed via a local GraphQL API. If you've never worked with GraphQL before, that's okay; Gatsby's docs walk you through the process.

Styling with CSS covers a broad range of topics so for more of a deep-dive check outMozilla's CSS Guide. Creating a style guide, some say, is a necessity when developing any kind of project. For example, Wikipedia defines it as : “A style guide (or manual of style) is a set of standards for the writing and design of documents, either for general use or for a specific publication, organization, or field. A style guide establishes and enforces style to improve communication. To do that, it ensures consistency within a document and across multiple documents and enforces best practice in usage and in language composition, visual composition, orthography and typography.” .

Creating a set of CSS conventions — often called a CSS style guide — can streamline your web development workflow. It’s useful for large teams and solo developers alike. CSS style guides are a group of documents that outline the coding style, best practices, and visual design properties (e.g. colors, layout grid dimensions, etc.) of a site. The goal of having a style guide is to maintain consistency across a product. If you’re in the process of creating a CSS style guide, or if you want to learn about the CSS practices that large-scale websites use, check out the following list of style guides.

I've gathered a list of UI designers and developer's favorite styleguides. Keep in mind that a styleguide is defined as a set of standards and rules on how to use and write CSS code. It often contains global branding definitions like colors and typography and a set of reusable components for building a more consistent and maintainable project.

• GitHub's CSS Styleguide
• WordPress CSS Styleguide
• Bootstrap CSS Styleguide
• Lonely Planet CSS Styleguide
• ThinkUp's CSS Styleguide

Ok, and Bash is...?

Bash (Bourne Again Shell) is a shell language built on top of the original Bourne Shell, which was distributed with V7 Unix in 1979 and became the standard for writing shell scripts. Today it is primary to most Linux distributions (see our Linux Command Line Cheat Sheet), MacOS, and it has even recently been enabled to run on Windows through something called WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux).

Testing files in scripts is easy and straightforward. This is where shell scripting starts to show its glory! In Bash, you can do file testing for permissions, size, date, file type, or existence.

the Bash Commands

• ls — List directory contents*
  

  `ls` is probably the most common command. A lot of times, you’ll be working in a directory and you’ll need to know what files are located there. The ls command allows you to quickly view all files within the specified directory.

• echo — Prints text to the terminal window
  

  `echo` prints text to the terminal window and is typically used in shell scripts and batch files to output status text to the screen or a computer file. Echo is also particularly useful for showing the values of environmental variables, which tell the shell how to behave as a user works at the command line or in scripts.

• touch — Creates a file
  

  `touch` is going to be the easiest way to create new files, but it can also be used to change timestamps on files and/or directories. You can create as many files as you want in a single command without worrying about overwriting files with the same name.

• mkdir — Create a directory
  

  `mkdir` is a useful command you can use to create directories. Any number of directories can be created simultaneously which can greatly speed up the process.

• grep — search
  

  `grep` is used to search text for patterns specified by the user. It is one of the most useful and powerful commands. There are often scenarios where you’ll be tasked to find a particular string or pattern within a file, but you don’t know where to start looking, that is where grep is extremely useful.

• man — Print manual or get help for a command
  

  The `man` command is your manual and is very useful when you need to figure out what a command does. For example, if you didn’t know what the command rmdir does, you could use the man command to find that out.

• pwd — Print working directory
  

  `pwd` is used to print the current directory you’re in. As an example, if you have multiple terminals going and you need to remember the exact directory you’re working within, then pwd will tell you.

• rm — remove files
  

  The `rm` command is how you remove files. You can remove a single file or multiple files at once. You can also remove directories with the `rm` command, but you’ll need to use the `-r` flag to remove directories.

You might think that you don't need command line at all if you started as a web developer and you just writing some javascript or css. But command line is an important tool which most programmers use every single day.

Notes:

there’s a really handy shortcut for opening everything within a project directory: . Once you’ve installed a text editor, you can use this shortcut to open up an entire project and all its files in one go. This shortcut is also commonly used with Git (later on it’s covered in detail) with commands like git add . to add all the files inside of a directory into Git’s staging area. For example, if you have VS Code installed, you can cd into the project directory and then type code . (with the period). It will launch VS Code and open up the project folder in the sidebar. See the next section of this lesson for a more detailed example.