Steve Frost | Front-End Engineer

Staying Focused, Staying Sharp

February 04, 2017

artist-staying-focused After graduating from Flatiron School last week, I found myself lost as to what to do next. Once your coding time is your own and not belonging to tuition, homework, or the next assessment, what do you do?

Celebrate Yourself

First, we celebrate. My fiancé and I went out to a dinner at Pauly Gee’s where they are serving some of the best wood-fired pies in Brooklyn. The next day I took an official day off of coding thinking I earned a break after eight months of intensive studying, listening to podcasts, etc, etc. I encourage everyone to step away from the computer every once in awhile as time away can be just as valuable as time spent in front of it.

Then Get Back to Your Craft

Following the celebration and the break, I refocused. Since I’ve been working with mostly front-end for the past two months, I decided to look into a backend framework and settled on node.js. I’m not too far into learning it but so far it is obviously very close to the metal. I like that saying. Node shares many similarities to browser Javascript so a substantial amount that was learned in the curriculum transfers over. One of the key differences is that there is no document or window in Node. Instead, since Node is running on the computer and not in the browser, there is access to environment variables, platform info, processes, versioning, architecture, uptime, memoryUsage, and a whole collection of data about the machine it is running on.

helping-others-picture

And Help Others

Alongside learning node, I’ve also signed up to be a mentor for a student who is go through NYU’s Re:Coded program. In the next couple days I’ll be paired up with a student located in Iraq who is learning the Flatiron curriculum. Out of everything going on right now, I think I am most excited for this. For those who know me, it comes as no surprise, for those who don’t, I love looking at other people’s code and problem solving in groups. I can’t wait.

I’m grateful for the opportunity to give back to the developer community after many in it helped me along. However, it’s made me question what I know of the basics and to dive into PluralSight again. The present imposter syndrome has me considering just how much frameworks obscure the basics of the language from the developer. I felt really comfortable with the innards & functionality of Angular and think that it sheltered me from the vanilla JS going on behind-the-scenes. I’m working to fill in this knowledge gap - whether it exists or not remains to be seen.


Steve Frost

Written by Steve Frost who lives in Minneapolis using technology to make an impact in the community and our environment.

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