Dark mode is now present in nearly every popular product. When Instagram, YouTube and even LinkedIn added the option, we can now say it has become mainstream.

There’s still many misconceptions about how Dark Mode should be created for the best results in terms of look&feel, accessibility, battery life and performance on all kinds of devices.

There’s more to Dark Mode than just inverting the colors. In this part of the series let’s explore colors and depth.

Avoid using 100% saturated accent colors, as they’re not visible on dark backgrounds. If your brand color is “strong” that way, just reduce the saturation for Dark Mode.

As you can see in the above example, the colors in Light mode, when placed on a darker background are harsh and difficult to look at. With that simple desaturation trick, they end up being a lot easier on the eyes.

Another thing is using a color theme for your dark grey shades that’s based on the accent color. You can’t go too far with it, but when done in a subtle manner it will transform the entire design into a consistent, coherent whole.

In our case (example above) I simply added a little touch of blue to the greys, so that it matches the button (accent color) and other UI elements better.

Another important part is the hierarchy of the layers, that’s mostly created by their brightness. The typical angle at which we old our phone is around 45°, and the most natural light source is the one coming from the top — either the sun or a ceiling light.

Even though the interface is completely flat, our mind still prefers to be cheated a little bit for better, easier to grasp hierarchy. This is why fake depth is important!

This is why you should avoid objects that are perceived as “on top”, or closer to the users being darker than the background. As you can see in the example on the left, it looks unnatural and takes it longer for our brain to process the image. The one on the right is more in line with how a real stack of layers would be lit.

One trick in particular that does it well is simply starting with a base brightness of the background (the darkest color) and adding 8 or 10 points of brightness to each of the levels.

Using that trick you’ll have a consistent “color distance” between the layers and it will help our brain process it faster.

I talk more about these concepts in my recent YouTube video, so be sure to watch it and let me know in the comments if you found the knowledge useful.

Good luck exploring Dark Mode! These videos will be connected into a longer, free course right here at hype4.academy! 

Dark Mode UI Essentials Part 1

Hello, Apple October event. I’ll share some thoughts on what was announced from the perspective of a designer. One thing I found instantly cool, was the hint of magsafe in the intro - cool move apple. 

Then they talked about music, but I don’t think many people care about that, so just to sum up, new home pods with colors now, now airpods pro and max with spatial audio. 

They also showed new, smaller regular airpods, i.e. the cheap kind. Fun Fact, Diane had both the regular ones and the pros and she lost one of each. From now one we always go wired. 

So a new, larger MacBook pro with a faster M1 chip was to be expected. It’s not M1X though, but M1 Pro. Oh and a second chip called M1 Max that’s also a double of the M1 Pro. So now I guess we have three processor tiers in the mac. 

Also don’t know if you noticed, but the Pro and Max naming conventions are almost matching the iPhones - the faster CPU should be called Pro Max though. But still some consistency is welcome. 

I tested the M1 MacBook Pro in Sketch a while ago and found out I can move an impressive 1800 design heavy artboards without a problem. You can watch that video here:

Now, they shared a lot of transitor science, but I don’t think most people understand any of that. 

The basics are there’s now a 10core CPU cores and 16 GPU cores. The graphics is now a lot faster too. For video editors building in ProRes support into the chip itself is likely going to be a game changer.For me the additional thunderbolt controllers were a happy addition, as I encountered many problems with connecting external devices to the M1 laptops. 

There are improvements in power efficiency, but I think it’s not as important as most pros use their laptops connected to power. It’s a nice to have though for some on the go work.

All the performance graphs now have numbers along the axis, which is something people made fun of at the M1 introduction where the graphs were a bit arbitrary - you couldn’t really see what they meant. I guess apple listened and added the numbers here - maybe they’re more condifent in the performance now. 

As for the video editing, I’ll have to use one of these chips to see a difference. I’m generally happy with my M1 Mac Mini, but it does stutter a little bit with two 4K videos on top of one another. Only for a second or two, until it plays fine, but I do feel it. 

They announced two new laptops, as expected 16 and 14” displays. 

They have magsafe again, hdmi, sd-card and headphone jack is still there too. Happy days! 

Three thunderbolt ports are still better than two, but I actually liked the four-port MacBook pros on Intel. But I guess that wouldn’t really fit into the chassis. 

Touchbar is also gone, good riddance! The new keyboard also looks a little different overall. 

There’s also a notch now for the camera, which I guess makes sense as it blends in with the action bar at the top. Unless you’re not using dark mode, then I guess you’ll have to adjust a bit because in light mode that camera notch is quite visible … 

ProMotion refresh rates on the display is also welcome - but mostly for content consumption. 

The display is now also Mini LED, so brighter and more like the largest iPad pro, which looks awesome. 

Better microphones and speakers were too be expected, but on that front Apple laptops were always pretty good. This is more of a feature for musicians. 

I was expecting the 16” to get the Max CPU, and the 14” to get the Pro, but apparently you can configure each CPU for each of the screen sizes. Good to know if you like the performance but want to go portable. 

The memory now tops at 64 gigs, which is a good welcome from the 16 gigs on the M1. And seeing how well the M1 performed with just 16, I’m happy to see what 64 will do on the Max. 

Batteries were also improved, but what’s more interesting is that there’s now a fast charge feature, allowing you to top up the battery by 50% in just 30 minutes. That’s going to save a lot of on the go projects!

It means the highest spec ones will be a lot more expensive than that, if this is just for the base versions. 

I was hoping for a 32” iMac Pro with the new chip, or the mini with the pro Cpus but I guess we’ll have to wait for those a while longer. I will definitely check these out though, as they do sound like an exciting step forward.

Apple M1 Pro and M1 Max Laptops are game-changers for creatives

Apple M1Pro and M1Max Laptops are a game changer for designers

As a person who has been doing so called “UX” for about 22 years now I’m going to pop that bubble for you today. Again.

Value is the most important part of the product.

It’s simply the friction that appears where you want to get to the value. The better the UX, the lower the friction. But it doesn’t depreciate the value, only the road to it.

When the value is mindblowing good, people will jump through flaming hoops of bad UX to get there.

Focus on the value first. Then polish the experience.

Don’t do UX just because the UX people used some jargon to tell you about empathy maps and customer journeys. Every customer has a journey to reach value.

Also — Product Market Fit research is not the job of an UX designer. Market researchers existed well before someone put the X in eXperience.

UX Is Overrated

The design world is getting faster and faster every year. Why? There are a couple of reasons. One is that the recent design tool revolution made our workflows much easier and faster. The last few years were also the

adventof design systems, or even design libraries and components. We also have a lot of existing knowledge of what works well, so in many cases, we can use these safe patterns to come up with design solutions much faster.

In general, design is about finding solutions to problems.

poetic reason too — with the global economy declining, companies simply cannot afford as much “design-time” as they were before. They still expect similar results though.

I’m going to share two basic techniques that can help you design faster. Of course, there’s a lot more to speed design in problem-spotting, problem-clearing, and fixing the obvious to reveal hidden issues. But let's start with something easy.

During a typical, 8-hour day, the actual “design” and problem solving usually takes only a small portion of the time. Most of it is repetitive tasks that we can optimize.

Now here’s the thing. The above reasons for speed design are all good, but they’re all business-based. And I’d like to think from the designer=human perspective too.

Counting hours as a way to calculate income is becoming an antiquated way, and when working from home, we should definitely push a “per outcome” approach. Estimate a cost for your work. Then do the work. Don’t worry about the “hours”.

You can accomplish the same amount of work done in less time. Which one would you choose?

And if you estimate it well and use the speed design techniques you, as a designer, will have a lot more time for other things. You’ll finish your UI design a lot faster. You can use that time to either learn new skills or simply relax.

The fact that the world is fast, doesn’t mean you need to keep running the hamster wheel all day. Just be fast and hyper-focused for short bursts. Finish your work and then it’s your time, on your terms.

Now listen up gang! We’re going to be saving seconds here. Yes — seconds.

When this approach becomes second nature, these seconds will compound into hours, days, and weeks. Because if you save a second or two on every little part of the job, the sum of the time saved is going to be a lot greater.

And if one technique saves you 8 seconds every hour, then this one technique will save you four full hours in a year of work. If you combine many of the techniques and a proper mindset you’ll be saving an hour a day in no-time.

And yes, at this scale 4 hours wouldn’t even fit on the canvas :-)

Let’s start with the basics. If you’re still moving all the UI rectangles to their final position with your mouse cursor, then you should stop right now! There are two more efficient ways to move an object to the right position.

One of them, if you’re grid-obsessed is to simply enter the right number for the X and Y values in the inspector. But let’s be honest — most of us don’t do that. We move things with our mouse to an approximate position, and then we

You do it by selecting and object and pressing an arrow key on the keyboard. In the example above the blue square is nudged by one point by a single press of the right arrow key. Of course the more you press your arrow key, the more you will move the object. But what if you want to nudge something by 10 points? Pressing the right arrow key 10 times would be a huge waste of time, right?

, that allows you to move objects even further — 10 points by default.

Now, I know this is super basic but hang in there. Just one more and I’ll show you something really cool.

Some plugins allow you to go oven further. A 

 plugin called Nudge, Push, Shove adds one more option called shove. It also allows you to modify the value for all three moves.

, you’re going to shove the element by 15 points by default.

These three keyboard-based moving techniques are essential for a speedy workflow. But it’s likely you already know that, so here’s the fun part.

You can combine nudge, push, and shove to decrease the number of keystrokes necessary to accomplish the same thing.

Let’s look at this particular scenario — we have two rectangles, currently

points apart. We want to nudge them to be

What would you do? There are two main ways to accomplish this.

The “obvious”, longer way that most of my students (during the first class) still use is to simply nudge the object 8 times. It’s simple and straightforward, but it also requires you to press the arrow key 8 times. That in itself takes a couple of seconds.

There is another, much better way to do this. It does require you to be fast with math, but once you try it you’ll feel like the Flash, speeding through your designs and saving the world one nudge at a time.

As you can see above, you can achieve the exact same result by pushing (10p) the object first, and then nudging it twice in the other direction. This is three keystrokes instead of 8 (assuming you count shift + arrow as one).

Of course you can merge all three techniques, including the

(15p), but it requires a little bit more effort and fast math skills.

Even if you save 3–4 seconds each time you perform this action, it’s one of the most common actions that you perform in the design tool. Looking at it from a perspective of a year…

If you’re working on an 8-point grid, you can use plugins to modify the default nudge, push and shove values to respect that. For example you can change the default 1/10/15 to 1/8/16 and that will speed up your workflow in a great way too.

Unless you’re working with an already pre-defined set (or a design-system), this trick can save you a lot of time. In a typical scenario, to add an icon to your project, you need to open an icon-pack, find the icon, copy it and paste it into the right file. Or find an individual SVG icon on your disk, and drag it onto the artboard.

Did you know that the most popular icons, like arrows, chevrons and magnifying glass, can be done very quickly inside your design tools? You can also create them way faster than it’ll take you to fetch them from an external library.

I made a short video on these techniques, that should help you especially with the exact “how-to” on the icons. It’s just some simple shapes, so definitely worth practicing.

Efficiency is definitely an area that needs improvement among UI designers. Obviously, a lot of that efficiency comes from practice, but you can implement some of these practices right now — even if you’re a beginner.

Saving those precious seconds will result in more time to learn actually useful things. Let me know if you’re using these, or any other speed designing techniques in your workflows.

Speed techniques to help you design faster

You can learn the basics of programming in no time. Countless resources will get you going. The hard part is to take a step from simple conditionals and loops to real-life applications. Fortunately, you can develop a few simple skills to help you along the way.

You’ll spend lots of time searching for information, and you need to do it effectively. Googling is a transferrable skill, so if you researched in depth any subject, you’d be fine. But make sure you put on quotes to search for the whole phrase, know how to set a date range, and use a hyphen to exclude words from search results.

You also need to master programming-specific Google skills. Not all information sources are created equal. Pay attention to websites and people that helped you solve a problem. Over time you’ll build a robust database of reliable resources.

Remember relevant technical terms. It will prove a lot more beneficial than you think. Programmers have a particular language to communicate fast and accurately. To find the information, you need to understand that language. For example, it’s a lot easier to discover why you don’t have access to the variable if you know the term

. Note every technical name and define it, if possible, using your own words.

Besides, when you know proper terms, you don’t need to read so much. Skim the internet. Search for the keywords in the text instead of reading everything.

When coding, most of the time, you’re on autopilot. But to progress as a developer, you need to be mindful of the code. Use errors as reminders to focus.

Mistakes are the perfect opportunities to learn new things. A new error or unexpected bug may vastly deepen your code understanding. When encountered, take a deep breath and analyze what happened. After you solve the issue — take notes. You’ll stumble on this same error again. Without the notes, it’s almost sure you’ll forget how to fix it.

Try not to take mistakes personally. Treat them as friends who help you develop your skills. If you need more information about a productive attitude towards errors, I wrote an

When you’ve mastered coding fundamentals, the learning curve becomes steeper. New concepts are significantly harder to grasp. You need to learn effectively in order to progress.

Assume you’ve watched a great tutorial. You coded along and built an app with your teacher. But two days later you don’t remember much. When you try to use new knowledge, you get stuck. You feel the urge to watch that great tutorial again.

Time is a precious resource. You shouldn’t use it for rewatching or rereading.

Here are three simple techniques that help you study effectively.

Active recall is a process in which you try to retrieve information from memory, instead of rereading it. A typical example is the use of flashcards.

You can use active recall anytime when learning to code. Next time when you’re watching or reading a tutorial, don’t code. Focus on following a teacher. Then try to recreate code from memory. Only get back to the lesson if you can’t reproduce some part.

You’ll understand new concepts much better if you learn in smaller chunks spread over time than if you cram in one sitting. Create a repetition system with the breaks increasing each time.

For example, learn about closures for thirty minutes. Check out what the closure is and when to use it, see some code samples, take notes, or make flashcards. Tomorrow, try to recall information about closure from memory. If you succeed, try again after three days. Each time lengthen a delay between repetitions. If you fail — stick to this same delay.

Experiment with different schedules to find the one that suits you the best.

Remember how you used to learn at school? You may have studied over all the semester, but you worked hardest and learned the most before the exam. Use that to your advantage.

Create a simple schedule. For example, devote two hours to testing once a month. You can easily find tests online or create them by yourself. The exam doesn’t need to have a traditional form. It’s even better if you test yourself by making an app using the knowledge you want to solidify.

There’s one way to learn to code: coding. But the world conspires to distract you — new articles, tutorials, courses fight for your attention. And the teacher in the last video had a great font in his IDE; you want to get it.

It’s all background noise. Don’t google for fonts or themes — yours are okay. Don’t watch another tutorial on this same topic. I know it’s easy, but it’s a waste of time. Your time is limited, use it wisely.

Build more side projects using the knowledge from tutorials. Don’t abandon the project after the first setback. Developers who take a break from the project don’t get back. So when you get stuck during an exciting project, ask for help. The programmers’ community is vast; lots of people want to help you.

Almost everything you’re trying to do right now has been done before. For your next project, you don’t need to create authentication or routing on your own. Numerous formidable and tested libraries are waiting for you.

Choosing the right tools is a part of your job. You need to become an expert in finding libraries and frameworks to help you. As developers, we’re standing on the shoulders of giants — leverage that.

But there’s a caveat. To pick your tools correctly, you need to strive to understand them. In your spare time, analyze the code of the libraries you’re using. You can even do a fun project of trying to recreate them. Many libraries are not that complex at their core. Think about how you would implement them.

How to Progress Rapidly as a Developer

It’s the most important skill in your life. Seriously. Software developers learn all the time. And even if programming is just a hobby to you, you still need to learn efficiently.

The basics are quite straightforward. To learn effectively, you have to build a habit — preferably learn every day. Additionally, use these three techniques:

You’ll struggle. Programming is difficult. You’ll fail often. Whether it’s some obscure bug or a concept you can’t grasp, challenges will appear. The best way to stay motivated in the face of adversity? By having fun!

Take a break from your task and find some joy in programming. You can solve algorithmic puzzles, take a look at creative coding, or create some silly app — whatever makes you smile.

Programming is not a chore. You need to have a good time and find something that sparks your curiosity, so look for opportunities to enjoy yourself.

You’ll spend lots of time searching for information. You need to learn how to do it proficiently.

Google, Stack Overflow, and GitHub issues will become your natural habitat, so make sure you can use them effectively. And don’t ever be shy when you need to look for something trivial — we all do it.

Practice makes perfect. It’s that simple. No amount of tutorials, courses, and boot camps can act as a substitute for it. You’ll be tempted to enroll in another class. Don’t do it.

You don’t need other videos explaining these same subjects over and over again. You need to build things yourself. Every app you build is worth dozens of tutorials. Create, fail, explore — that’s how you grow.

There’s nothing more annoying than a bug you can’t find. Sometimes the project stops for weeks because one nasty bug is haunting you. Unfortunately, debugging is a huge part of programming and you have to master it.

Study debugging techniques and learn to use logs and debuggers efficiently. As a quick tip, I recommend debugging by divide and conquer. It’s a technique in which you split suspicious code by half and look at which half seems to be broken. Repeat it on smaller and smaller code parts until you find a culprit.

Often you’ll have a problem and no idea how to tackle it. Creating a huge app from scratch seems like an impossible venture. Instead of wondering how to do it, do it. Isolate some small part and start coding.

You don’t need to create perfect code. You need to have something and try out some ideas. It will give you a better understanding of your problem.

Thinking before programming is necessary, but you’ll only know if your plan is feasible at all when you get your hands dirty.

7. Be Considerate — Write Readable Code

This quote should be your mantra. Building applications is a team sport and you have to communicate with other team members through your code. Even if you’re working solo on a personal project, you’re communicating with someone else — your future self.

Be considerate. Think about everyone who will read your code. Study code readability and maintainability. You’ll reap the benefits fast.

You’ll make a mess of your code — I guarantee it. Applications tend to grow in unpredictable directions and the code inevitably gets more and more cluttered. After some time, it will become unwieldy and each minor change may require dozens of adjustments.

To avoid that, clean something every time you touch a file. Get rid of unnecessary things that impede code understanding. Remove unused variables, change the names of others. Delete outdated comments, simplify your abstractions. Leave the code in a better state than you encountered it in.

Do you know how you become a great writer? By reading great writers and trying to emulate them until you find your own voice. It’s the same with programmers.

Look for open source projects with great code quality and try to understand them. If you’ve got some proficient developers at your company, look at their commits. Study the code of the greats and try to learn from it. Reading their code is like reading their minds —take advantage of that.

You should have a blog. Period. It may serve multiple purposes. You can use it as a diary of your progress and growth. You can learn a lot from writing about the things you are learning. The process will solidify and organize your knowledge. You can help others who face these same problems. Maybe you’ll even find a job or build a community. Just blog.

I didn’t start a blog until I was five years into my programming journey. It’s my greatest learning regret.

Your job is to solve problems — not write code. Learn how to identify what problems you are trying to solve: your client or boss's requirements.

As programmers, we tend to waste hours on unimportant things. We polish our code like a priceless car. But the code is just a tool. The product is what matters. Being productive is different from being busy. Being productive is different from being a perfectionist. Being productive is all about providing value. Code to provide the value.

Schedule some minimal time for coding every day. You may take a day or two off, but building a habit of programming is essential.

Maybe your code is not art (yet), but you should listen to Neil. Consistency is essential for your success as a developer.

You will forget almost everything you read today. Don’t trust your memory and document everything — the problems you encountered and how you solved them. Algorithms, functions, learning materials. Everything.

You can use your blog as a space for your notes or some of the other countless tools available. Whatever works for you. But please take notes. Build your own knowledge database.

You can’t be a jack of all trades. Programming is too vast and you will never learn everything. Besides, experts tend to be rewarded generously.

Especially if you’re a junior developer, you need to pick your tech stack. Nobody expects you to know everything, but you should have in-depth knowledge of

Programming is hard. You’ll fail many more times than you imagine. And that’s fine. As long as you’re encountering new ways to fail, you’re making progress.

The secret is not to be too hard on yourself. Embrace the failure and recognize that it’s an essential part of the process. Extend beyond your limits. Make the failure you friend.

Look for optimizations everywhere. Automate every mundane and boring thing you can. Look for the patterns in your work, repeated code, or similar features. Then automate them.

Every line of code is expensive to write and maintain. Look for ways to write less code, and you’ll find you’ve got fewer bugs and better quality. Use well-tested libraries instead of writing everything from scratch.

Leverage the tools at your disposal to create the most value from the least time and code.

Taking care of your health is amongst the best things you can do for your career. And your life. I won’t go into all the overworking drawbacks, but to name a few of them: raised stress level, lowered energy, troubles with sleep, feeling distracted, mood changes. And you’ll work worse.

Overworking is not worth it, really. Set some boundaries. For some, working 40 hours a week is the maximum. Others can work as long as 50 or 60. It doesn't matter where your limit is. What matters is not exceeding it.

Curiosity is what I’m looking for when I’m recruiting junior developers. A curious person always wants to learn more and understand how and why things work. For my company, your long-term contribution is more important than your current skill set.

Be interested. It will benefit your growth and your job hunt. It will also make your life more interesting.

That was a lot of tips, but there are more of them. Maybe you’ve got something to add?

18 Ways to Improve Your Programming

I’ve seen hundreds of junior frontend developers' resumes. In an average recruitment process, we get 80 candidates for one job.

The sad truth is you have to stand out. If there’s nothing special about your skills or experience, you have to be lucky to get a job. And relying on luck is not a reliable tactic.

Fortunately, it’s not that hard to stand out. Most of the resumes are like carbon copies. The candidates finished the same bootcamps or online courses. They have similar projects. Sometimes, even their portfolio pages are indistinguishable.

Here are a few ideas to put you ahead of the competition.

Blogging has so many benefits for junior developers. Above all, writing is amongst the best ways of learning. To explain a topic, you have to deep-dive into it and structure your mental models.

When you start to write a blog post, you discover hidden layers of complexity everywhere—the things you took for granted suddenly become questionable.

Even simple things, like paddings and margins in CSS, have some complexities and edge cases. By the time you finish the article, you’ll grasp the subject much better.

What’s even better, your blog is proof of your progress. If you’ve been blogging regularly for months, your future employer can see programming is not a temporary whim but something you take seriously. That’s a great indicator you’re someone worth working with.

The next advantage of having a blog is the chance to create a network. If your blog becomes popular, you’ve got the unique ability to meet other people or even help them. It’s not only fun but can also help you get noticed and find a job by referral.

Not starting a blog when I was a junior developer is my greatest regret. I could have accelerated my education and helped others.

Suppose you’re like almost everyone — you find postings on job boards and apply to the companies when you more or less meet the requirements. That’s fine. But there’s one problem: Thousands of other people are doing the same.

It’s hard to find a job when you’re doing the same as everyone else.

Apply to the companies you like. Many smaller companies need more employees but don’t want to go through the hassle of the recruitment process. So help them.

Research companies you’d like to work with and send them an email. Just a short message about how you admire what they do and would love to be a part of the team. Chances are you’ll get an answer, and if you’re lucky, you may even get a job.

Being proactive is so advantageous because you cut through the noise. You don’t need to compete with dozens of developers. You just need to convince a company you’ll bring value.

What’s more, by being proactive, you show your future employer you’re resourceful, care about the company, and appreciate its products.

Freelancing is not for everybody. Especially at the beginning of your career, working for a company and having a mentor is usually a better bet.

But… a little freelancing is a great way to get relevant experience. Looking for work on Fiverr or Upwork can be underwhelming because the competition is huge and prices are low. Yet when you eventually find a client, you get many benefits.

Even a cheap project is better than a free project. And all your learning projects are free. So creating an app for a small salary is a bit like finding someone willing to pay for your learning. Sounds good, doesn’t it?

Additionally, freelancing clients can pay you with something more valuable than money — testimonials. Having real and satisfied clients on your portfolio page is a huge boost to your job-seeking chances.

And if you are fortunate, one of your freelancing customers can offer you a job. Isn’t that great?

You may have heard that contributing to open source is great to improve your programming skills. It is. It’s also a great sign for your future employer — it shows that you’re active in the programming community, can use version control, and understand the software creation process.

No one is doing it. In the hundreds of junior developer resumes I’ve seen, maybe a handful of candidates were contributing to open source. And guess what? They got invited to a technical interview.

I know open source seems scary to junior developers. You may have many doubts. How can you provide any value? Where do you start? Will they judge you? Don’t worry, the programming world is friendly and always happy to help beginners.

GitHub repository. It includes many tips on how to start and a list of beginner-friendly projects. This guide will smooth your transition to the open source world.

Writing good code will make your job search easier. What is good code? Code that does its job, is readable, maintainable, and follows good conventions like DRY (Don’t Repeat Yourself) and KISS (Keep It Simple, Stupid).

When you’re a beginner, you don’t know if your code is any good. The ability to recognize solid code is something that comes with experience. You don’t have experience, so you don’t know. You can’t get experience because you don’t have a job—it’s a vicious circle.

Luckily, I’ve got a shortcut to show your future employer you know what you’re doing: Write tests for your code.

Tests are great. They show that you care about quality. Junior developers rarely include them, so you can stand out. They are proof you’re able to do some extra work.

You may not know if your code is good, but you’ll know if it is tested. And tested code is always better.

How about you? What are your strategies when looking for a job? Or maybe you already got a job and want to share your experience.

5 Tips To Beat the Competition and Get a Frontend Job

What to do next? Photo by Startup Stock Photos

How many courses, tutorials, and articles are waiting on your to-do list? If you’re a bit like me, the answer is dozens. I’m a passionate learner who is interested in a wide range of programming subjects. But lately, I started to wonder which courses are worth my time and which are just a distraction.

If you’re trying to develop your career, you probably encountered the idea of T-shaped people. They are experts in one field and have some expertise in other domains. For example, you can be a proficient back-end developer with some knowledge about DevOps, product management, and the front end.

T-shaped people are priceless employees because their diverse knowledge facilitates communication and bolsters creativity.

A broad range of interests may be advantageous. I’m an advocate for versatility and believe it’s the key competence of the future. But to be a T-shaped person, you need do possess reasonably in-depth knowledge of several subjects.

Finishing a course or two doesn’t mean you understand a field. What’s even worse, it may give you false confidence in your abilities. Learning too many things and spreading yourself thin won’t help you to develop a career. It just makes you a dabbler.

Much like you’re not an accomplished writer if you wrote two blog posts, you’re not a competent programmer after a month-long boot camp.

A T-shaped person is not someone who just scratched the surface of multiple fields. You have to carefully plan how to deepen your primary area of expertise and develop secondary skills.

To achieve success, you need to identify essential competencies and challenges. Later, laser-focus on them, removing all unnecessary courses. I’ll use myself as an example of how you can approach this.

I’m a competent front-end web developer with some knowledge about back-end programming in several languages. I’ve created a few mobile apps using React Native. That’s more or less my skill set, with a strong bend towards the front end. Time to choose my essentials and cut off the excess.

Innovative educational platform for designers and developers

Featured courses

The Complete Guide: UI in Mobile Apps

Going High Fidelity: UI in Mobile Apps

Dark Mode UI Essentials Part 1

Apple M1 Pro and M1 Max Laptops are game-changers for creatives

UX Is Overrated

Speed techniques to help you design faster

How to Progress Rapidly as a Developer

18 Ways to Improve Your Programming

5 Tips To Beat the Competition and Get a Frontend Job

How to Become a Better Programmer by Learning Less

What is HYPE4 Academy?

What is HYPE4 Academy?

Want to stay informed about new courses & books?

Psst. We post very cool content on our Instagram:
@hype4academy

Innovative educational platform for designers and developers

Featured courses

The Complete Guide: UI in Mobile Apps

Going High Fidelity: UI in Mobile Apps

Dark Mode UI Essentials Part 1

Apple M1 Pro and M1 Max Laptops are game-changers for creatives

UX Is Overrated

Speed techniques to help you design faster

How to Progress Rapidly as a Developer

18 Ways to Improve Your Programming

5 Tips To Beat the Competition and Get a Frontend Job

How to Become a Better Programmer by Learning Less

What is HYPE4 Academy?

What is HYPE4 Academy?

Want to stay informed about new courses & books?

Psst. We post very cool content on our Instagram:@hype4academy

Psst. We post very cool content on our Instagram:
@hype4academy