Hello and welcome to episode 13 of Inspect. So number 13, I'm lucky for some, but luckily for you, I've got a great question to answer from Listener Kabbash. Kabbash is a member of the Inspect Slack team and that's where he asked this question. Before we get into the question, I just want to remind the listeners that there is an Inspect Slack team which can join.
You can find it at inspect.fm.flschlack and you just need to answer a couple of questions and I will send you an invite to that team. It's a place where we can talk about what's being covered in the episodes. I'll also be sharing the episodes there first so you can get a preview of what's to come. And yeah, just a place to sort of build a bit of community around the podcast.
So yeah, check it out, inspect.fm.flschlack. So on to today's question. So Kabbash writes, I'm a front-end developer with two years of experience but sometimes I feel like I'm not growing at a good pace. How do I evaluate myself and determine if I'm a good developer?
So yeah, this is a great question and I think it's something that a lot of us have probably felt at some point in our careers. But as a designer, a developer, or any other position really is where you feel that you're not really worthy of the position that you're in. And these sorts of feelings are commonly known as imposter syndrome. Essentially what imposter syndrome is is when you feel, when you personally feel that you don't deserve to be in the position that you're in or that one day you're going to be found out as not having the skills which your peers or your colleagues may think that you have.
And it's a very common thing amongst people of all different scenario levels in all sorts of industries as well. So yeah, this is pretty much exactly what Kabbash's question is asking. Yeah, you also know how does he evaluate himself and is he a good developer? So the way I'd like to answer this question is in three parts.
The first part is to see what you already know. Secondly, to increase your skill level and thirdly, just to get your second opinion. And I think if you follow these three steps, you should get a good clear indication of where you are as a developer and you should also be able to do some self-evaluation and see whether you need to brush up on certain skills to get to that to a certain level. So firstly, seeing what you already know, so you don't know what you don't know.
So it's best to test yourself. Now, a good place to do this is on sitthetest.com. So it has short tests on CSS, HTML, and JavaScript, just 25 questions each. And they should give you a good indication of where you are currently.
If you completely fail these tests, then I would say that you're definitely a beginner and you need to start the basics. If you're using these tests, you're probably intermediate to advanced level and you probably skip some of the basics and focus more on some of the more advanced techniques in all of these languages. It's a good site. I've taken the test myself and I've scored around 80 to 85% on each of those three tests.
So they're not completely impossible, but there are a couple of tricky questions in there which might catch you out. So it's definitely worth checking out. And while I was doing my research on this question, I also came across another similar site by a chat named David Sharif. So he's created a similar quiz, which has a, which is split into the three sections of HTML CSS and JavaScript as well.
His questions are a little bit trickier than they are on sit the test. I only scored 60% on his test. Again, there was a few tricky questions. There was a couple answers which I didn't actually agree with as well.
So I don't know if it's how accurate it is, but it's worth checking out. There'll be a link to that in the show notes, but basically it's David Sharif.com. So I definitely have a look at both of those two sites, sit both of those tests, and it should give you a good indication of where you currently are. So if you don't want to do any practical testing and maybe just read some questions and answer them in your mind, then I would look at the front end developer interview questions on GitHub, which is by the HTML5 boilerplate team.
Again, link in the show notes, have a look at it. It's basically a repository where people post up questions which may come up in front end developer interviews. And they basically say that if you can answer these questions, then you should be good to go for an interview for that type of job. So I'd recommend just reading through them.
And so you see how many you can answer off your head. There'll be some where you definitely know the answer. There'll be some where you think you might know the answer. There'll be some where you definitely don't know how to tackle them.
So again, those might give you an indication of where you currently stand on a particular topic. So now that you've taken a couple of tests, you should have a good indication of where you currently are. And the next thing you'll want to do is level up your skills. Now, there's loads of places you can do this online.
Some of my favorites are code school, code academy. There's a linda.com treehouse, Udacity, Plural site. But there's loads of others you could just sort of bring up search for online developer training. And I'm sure you'll find something.
Yeah, so from some of the ones that I've tried, I would say that my favorite is probably code school. Just because of the way that they teach is very interactive. They have this concept of paths. So you can go down a JavaScript path, you can go down a C-sharp path or HTML path.
And then you can also do some more sort of broader development topics like Git and SQL or developer tools, for example. Each of those paths has some sort of theme. So it's quite interesting to watch rather than just watching a video and sort of consuming content, you're watching something a bit more entertaining. And after watching the videos, then you do some practical work in the browser.
So they have a development environment set up in the browser. And they have questions which you then answer, and then you can see the output of your code there in the browser. So there's minimum setup required. I've got a lot of free lessons as well.
Normally, the first lesson in each of those paths is free. But then after that, you do need to subscribe. If you prefer to learn by just watching a video, and then maybe working on it in your own time, then maybe check out linda.com. There's a much broader range of topics, but it's not as interactive as the others.
In fact, it's not interactive at all. What you can do is you can download exercise files for each of these courses, and you can work along while you're watching the video. By the way, the difference from code school is where you're working in the browser. Here, you need to work in your own code editor on your own computer.
So there may be a little bit of setup involved, and you will need to have some software on your computer, which you should have anyway. There's also code academy, which is a little bit more front-end focus. It's completely free, but yeah, it's also a really good resource to check that one out. Another option is Udacity, which is a bit more like university courses which you do online.
The courses are a lot longer. They generally span over a few months, and each of those courses are priced individually. They start from around about £200 for a course, and you do that all in your own time, but if you do it at their time scale, they suggest most of the courses last couple of months. It's more in depth learning over a longer period, a bit more like studying at university.
Finally, there's a prototype, which is now the parent company of code school. What a prototype does is it allows you to take a short test before you start down a particular path. By taking that test, you can determine what your current level is on that path, and whether you need to go into a beginner course in the path, or maybe join it midway at the intermediate level or at the advanced level. That's quite nice as well, because you can get some sort of instant feedback on where you currently stand as well, similar to the sit-the-test site.
It just asks you a serious question. Again, I found that the Pluralsite tests are quite difficult. Multiple choice questions and the answers are very similar, so there are a few questions which will catch you out. I think it's a really good place to determine what your current level is.
Hopefully, if you go through a few of these online training sites, you'll see where you need to improve and then you can focus in on those areas and level up your skills in that way. My final bit of advice would be to get a second opinion from your peers. If you work in a development team in a company, you could get a code review done by one of the senior developers, for example. By getting a senior person in the team to review a code, not only are you going to be evaluating yourself, but you're also getting someone else to evaluate you as well.
This is good to make sure that you're meeting the right standards set by your team. Also, it could help with your review process. If you were looking for some sort of promotion within the company, then you could use your code reviews as collateral to say that your meeting standards or your code has got better over certain times and you're hitting your targets and your objectives. Getting your code reviewed is not only going to help you write better code, but it could also help your career progression as well.
If you don't work in a development team or you're a freelancer, for example, then one thing you could do is if you've got any code that's public on GitHub, you could post that to the development community on Twitter and just ask them to look at your code and maybe review it that way. The good thing about this is that people can comment directly onto your code in GitHub. They can also submit pull requests if they think that anything needs to be changed, or you might even find a collaborator on your project and then you can get into the whole code review process with that person as well. You can also create a demo on CodePen.
You can get people to look at your HTML, your CSS, your JavaScript, and see the final output. People can comment directly on there and people can create a fork and make changes and maybe send that back to you, which is something that's happened to me in the past. Ask the community because people are helpful and I'd be happy to review some of your code as well if you want to never send me something. Get your code out there.
Put it on GitHub, put it on CodePen, start tweeting it out, sharing it to the community and just get some second opinions and people will let you know what's good and what's not and what can be improved and what doesn't need to be. That should hopefully help you determine what level of developer you are and where you need to go next. Hopefully that's answered your question, Kalpeche, and it'll give you some indication of where to go next in your development journey. If anyone else out there would like to ask a question of any kind, you can do so via Twitter at InspectorFem or like Kalpeche, you could join the Inspect Slack team.
Head over to the Inspect your FM, force your Slack, get yourself an invite and you can ask your questions in there. As always, do check out the show notes at inspect.fm or in your podcast player. If you like what you're hearing, do leave a review or rating on iTunes and if you like to support the show in any way then check out the website and there's details on how to do that as well. And yeah, thanks once again to Kalpeche for the question.
I look forward to answering more questions in the future and I will catch you all in the next episode.