A Frontend Masters Review

I'm always looking for the next set of courses to take. Looking to refine the recommended courses and learn something myself. Frontend Masters is a site I've always avoided for two reasons. It seems to be frontend only, and the lecture style of the videos makes it seem more like a recorded coding bootcamp. But this is far from the case, and I wish I tried it sooner.

Instructors like Will Sentance, Maximiliano Firtman, Kyle Simpson and others have inspired me to not just completely redo this site, but shift my thinking entirely about working with the web. I've always said I appreciate working with web standards first, but what I was talking about is frameworks like Remix or QwikCity using these magical, unapproachable things called service workers.

Instead, I've realized that a service worker seems just as easy to work with as React Query. I have another article on mixing service worker caching with fetch invalidation.

I've learned that my thinking around web components was all wrong. I was focused on the fact that they aren't compatible with SSR, didn't stop to realize that what they provide is closures for HTML. I have an article planned on explaining my thinking around this as well.

I've learned to think of JavaScript as the event driven language it is. We can take advantage of JavaScript's event loop and think in a system of three queues to get a lot of power out of it. Web workers are very easy to write, and multithreaded JavaScript is as simple as worker.postMessage('start').

Frameworks are getting more and more complex to try to be more performant, or to try to get closer to "web standards." But it turns out, there's a framework that does this better than all of them. The browser. All these frameworks meant to make everything easier, and I've realized they've only made things more difficult and less peformant. I have an article planned to talk about why you don't need a frontend framework.

That is a lot of inspiration from a single site. I will admit that many years ago I would have been very board with this content. When I was in college, for example, I would have hated Frontend Masters. I would have preferred to just learn how to build an app. Who cares that document is not a part of JavaScript? Why should I need to know how to write a service worker? That's such a niche problem.

But as I've gotten familiar with building applications, I'm less interested in learning how to do so in yet another language, yet another framework.

So Frontend Masters deeper dives, and topics around actual web standards really grabbed my interest. And the quality of the courses is above and beyond.

When I restructured the recommended courses recently, I organized sources into categories. Learn basic programming with Colt Steele, learn to build with Academind, learn algorithms with AlgoExpert, and learn the web with frontend masters.

For anyone that's bored with the code alongs, tired of the algorithms, and not seeing picking up yet another framework as a reasonable next step, I can't recommend Frontend Masters enough.