As I’m nearing a year as a frontend developer, I thought I’d share some of my first impressions from this time.

I’m currently working at a medium-sized (~900 employees) technology company, where I use React and TypeScript on a daily basis. So far, I’ve worked on both a legacy project and a completely new one. Now, let’s talk about a few things:

Things that I liked

• Working with a team: Until now, I’ve mostly worked alone, which can be lonely and stressful at times, since you’re solely responsible for everything—successes and failures alike.
• Single responsability: I don’t have to worry about areas outside of architecture, design, and development. There are specialists handling DevOps, deployment, QA, and so on.
• Agile methodology: The communication and task tracking make the work environment much more enjoyable.
• TypeScript: It’s a great addition to JavaScript (more on that later), offering a nice syntax and powerful features. It can be a bit tricky at times, though.
• Tailwind: Similar to Bootstrap (which I’ve used a lot in the past), it makes the development process a breeze.
• Redux/ReactRedux: I really appreciate the principles behind its Three Principles: single source of truth, read-only state and reducers.

Things that I didn’t like

• JavaScript: Coming from the world of strongly-typed languages, I initially found working with JavaScript a bit frustrating. Thankfully, TypeScript is here to restore some sanity.
• shadcn/ui: This library feels a bit messy to me, with lots of abstractions and component variations. However, it’s highly customizable and uses Radix under the hood, which provides a nice API for interacting with components.
• Orval: I generally don’t enjoy tools that automatically generate code, and this one is no exception. It feels like you lose flexibility, and it often makes the code harder to read than necessary.

Overall, it’s been a great experience, and I’m enjoying every moment. I never imagined that I’d be coding in JavaScript and working on frontend development, but here we are — life has a way of surprising us.

I’m looking forward to the challenges and lessons that will come, and I hope to make a positive impact on my team and company, just as they have had on me.