Hacker News Reader

Comment by zaptheimpaler | Hacker News Reader

This looks really cool! This is not super related to your business, but do you have any recommendations for how to get started with frontend dev as a beginner? I usually do backend/infra stuff, and the frontend world is overwhelming - particularly CSS.

Do you have any tips on the best way to learn CSS? And do you think using React + MobX allows faster dev compared to vanilla javascript?

View on HN

Not CSS, but reading those three articles should give you a good primer on JS:

https://medium.com/the-node-js-collection/modern-javascript-...

https://medium.com/@parsyval/javascript-prototype-vs-class-a...

https://medium.freecodecamp.org/here-are-examples-of-everyth...

Thanks! I think the best way to get started right now is to grab the official Facebook create-react-app package, pick something you think would be fun to build, and just start trying to build it and googling/asking questions along the way. The first project might suck, but that's okay. You'll pick it up fast, and the next will be better.

React + MobX is my favorite way to build frontend apps now, and MobX does help a lot in terms of development speed, maintainability, and performance, in my experience. If you're brand new to frontend development, I wouldn't worry too much about it, though - it can be best to start with the basics initially.

To add to this. For beginners it can be a pain to learn how to set your environment up to even begin developing.

https://codepen.io/ is a great place for front-end developers to hone their skills without having to worry about any of the setup.

You can use Pug (formerly Jade), Haml, Markdown, Slim, SCSS, Sass, LESS, PostCSS, Stylus, Coffeescript, Typescript, Livescript, Babel, or just plain HTML, CSS and JS without having to set up a thing.

Edit: I'm not affiliated with Codepen. I am however a user.

iEchoic congrats on the new design! Very slick and smooth.

Just a quick question. Are you using CRA with SSR (ie with nextjs or other solution?) for the new site? Or is it just a large SPA served from static html,js,css bundled?

Thanks Matt

Thanks! No SSR here, just an SPA (static html/js/css) served up via CDN. We do use code splitting to load bundles progressively to keep the bundle size down.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com