Yangshun Tay

✌️ The creator of Vue did not have a CS degree.

He studied Art History. He created Vue as a lightweight alternative to Angular.

🔥 The creator of Svelte did not have a CS degree.

He was a journalist and graphics editor at The Guardian. He created Svelte while working in journalism to improve the performance and maintainability of interactive web graphics.

🍺 The creator of Homebrew did not have a CS degree.

He studied chemistry. He built Homebrew as a side project, which eventually became an essential tool for macOS users.

🔗 The creators of Django studied journalism and philosophy.

They built Django while working at a newspaper to streamline web development.

While formal CS education is helpful, it's not strictly necessary for a career in Software Engineering. Practical experience, curiosity, and problem solving skills can be more valuable.

Passion is a driver for great things, typically a stronger motivator than FAANG salaries and big tech perks.

#vue #svelte #django #homebrew
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I post regularly about software engineering, front end, memes, and more.
Follow me Yangshun Tay and my company GreatFrontEnd

⚡ How I improved https://greatfrontend.com to achieve near-perfect Lighthouse scores ⚡

We write a lot about performance optimization techniques at GreatFrontEnd, how many of them are actually beneficial? Turns out they're pretty effective. I managed to improve the Lighthouse score of the homepage by leveraging these techniques.

Btw GreatFrontEnd's homepage has a fair number of interactive content and media, so I won't consider it a trivial page.

1) Image format: Media (e.g. images) are easily most of the bytes downloaded on marketing pages. You can reduce your downloaded significantly by optimizing your media assets. I converted all the images to be `.webp` format and also resized them to be just the right dimensions. For logos I used SVGs. I didn't find any need for `srcset` at all.

2) Lazy load heavy elements: The homepage actually loads quite a lot of JavaScript due to the demo questions. The editor itself is few MB of JavaScript! Solution: separate out the demo question section and loaded it in lazily when it is nearly visible.

3) Static generation: Although there are dynamic portions of the page, I forced the page to be statically generated and dynamic portions are loaded on the client. SSG beats SSR if you can afford to have loading states.

4) Lazy load below-the-fold content: Lazy loading comes to the rescue again! Lighthouse was complaining the page had too many elements. The page was very long! Hence I split the page into two and lazy loaded the bottom.

5) Code splitting: With Next.js, each page is its own bundle. The homepage size stays relatively small because it's not affected by what I build on other pages or the number of pages there are.

These are somewhat basic performance techniques, but you'd be shocked by how many sites don't even do them. Have a good look at your website, there are probably many performance low hanging fruits that you can grab.

#frontend #performance #webdevelopment

Front end engineer interviews can be broken down into the following:

1. JavaScript coding interview
You need to know: Closures, Callbacks, Promises, Polyfills, async/await, this keyword, setTimeout, setInterval

Practice JS questions here: https://lnkd.in/gxjq3SHG

2. User interface coding interview
You need to know: DOM traversal + creation + manipulation, semantic HTML, form validation + submission, CSS box model, selectors, units, designing components, state design + management, accessibility

Practice UI coding questions here: https://lnkd.in/gvJKr9cT

3. System design interview
You need to know: Rendering patterns, state management, component architecture, networking techniques, accessibility, performance, SEO, UX, i18n, security

Practice system design questions here: https://lnkd.in/gZkHuv7E

4. Quiz questions
You need to know: Basically everything above

Practice quiz questions here: https://lnkd.in/g9WXGA97

5. Data structure & algorithms interviews
You need to know: Big O time and space complexity, common data structures like Array, Set, Map, Tree, Graph. Algorithms like binary search, BFS/DFS, recursion

Practice algo questions here: https://lnkd.in/gQwiZghD

6. Behavioral interviews
Prepare a good self intro, prepare multiple stories beforehand that you can apply to different categories of questions, deliver using the CARL/STAR methods

Learn more about behavioral interviews: https://lnkd.in/gssBFuHg

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💡 Follow me Yangshun Tay and my company GreatFrontEnd for more front end tips

I've been mentored by many top software engineers in the industry.\n\nThey don't even know who I am. \n\n- I learned scaling distributed systems from Jeff Dean by reading his papers on Bigtable and Spanner\n- I learned how to build modern bundlers from Evan You by reading Vite's source code\n- I learned how React works from Dan Abramov and Sebastian Markbage by reading React's source code\n- I learned JavaScript from Addy Osmani by reading patterns.dev and his book on JavaScript Design Patterns\n- I learned how to build testing frameworks like Jest from Christoph Nakazawa by reading his blog cpojer.net\n- I learned software development from Martin Fowler's by reading martinfowler.com\n\nMany influential people have shared their experiences, expertise, and knowledge online in the form of papers, code, articles, talks. Most are free for anyone to access.\n\nDirect mentorship is hard to come by, but indirect mentorship is readily available if you bother to look.\n\nWith GreatFrontEnd.com, I’m turning years of knowledge into structured content so I can mentor thousands of front-end engineers – even if we never meet.\n\n———\n\n♻ Repost to help others discover \n💡 Follow Yangshun Tay and my company GreatFrontEnd for more