matsdis

My impression is that writing “pure CSS” has been replaced by writing !important selectors that undo all of your component library’s auto-generated CSS, and then write your own CSS selectors on top, after trying to figure out the theming system for half a day… /rant

If you want to try another, maybe Material. (The design guidelines or the components. But IMO the component docu has gotten worse.) But if you are going to overwrite the styles anyway, it may be easier to write your own CSS instead of debugging someone else’s.

So learn the HTML/CSS basics that you are missing, mostly on MDN. (CSS: selectors, pseudo-classes, flexbox, grid, css variables, units like rem/px/vh, media queries, collapsing of the margin, css reset and box-sizing, overflow, display, positioning, …; HTML/Web APIs: CSP, self-closing tags, fetch() API, querySelect(), URL.parse(), sessionStorage, form submit, form validation, blob, event bubbling, your browser’s inspect tools, …).

Even if you use a framework you will generally have to learn all this stuff anyway.

This is orthogonal. If you want to do anything custom, it will often be easier to not use your JS framework at all for that part of the App. If you are going to use Tauri you will be using the Tauri API not the API of your framework. If you want stuff like touch input or show system notifications, you’ll use the browser’s APIs for that. If anything the framework will be in the way for lower-level stuff, and you always have the option to not use it for some part of your App.

Maybe you are looking for a component library, something like Bulma or Bootstrap, rather than a JS framework. Your primary problem may be design, UX layout and learning basic CSS/HTML.

But if you want one of the lighter frameworks, I’d try Vue. But it is increasingly possible to do stuff without a framework, especially if your needs are not too complex. I’d start by looking into Vite, and use one of its simpler templates. You may want to select typescript instead of JS if you get the option.

Also… when you say “Frontend” we don’t know if you’re going to do a visualization-rich 3D application with touch gestures, or a business CRUD applications with lots of forms and tables and paginated lists filtered server-side, or a content-heavy web page with lots of articles to read…?

More specifically, please don’t use PNG for photos. Just converting to JPEG should do the trick.

More silly fun with types: (4min video) https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/wat
(It starts with Ruby, but hang on.)

Protip: (kinda half rant too) Join a general software consulting company. You will then have the opposite problem, you will be seen as ANYTHING dev. Whatever combination of os, language, framework and domain you have the least experience with, you will be picked for that project because you’re available. The dice will be re-rolled every 6 months. Until then you’ll be the Angular dev. Oh wait you didn’t mention Angular. Tough luck. This is the protip, not the amateurtip.

Amateurtip: (kinda half joking) You don’t need a job to be Vue or Svelte developer…

And when the opportunity comes to select the tech stack, or switch teams/jobs, having any hands-on experience (even if it was just the tutorial) will be a huge plus, compared to nothing. You will know better what you’re talking about, and it proves that you are seriously motivated. (Of course, you can also mention your side-project to your colleagues once or twice.)