67: HELP

1. I'm not sure what you mean by "clone coding". Care to elaborate?

2. Problem-solving is all about practice. It takes a lot of time and practice to get better at it. Programming by itself doesn't require much pure math knowledge, it is mostly just logical thinking. I don't remember how many problems I did when I was first starting out, I did a few on sites like Hackerrank and Codewars. But even if I did remember how many it wouldn't matter much. People learn at different speeds and it's hard to compare skill.

3. A mentor is not necessary at all. Many people have learned programming all by themselves. Although a mentor can be nice to have. While I'm not self-taught, I learned to program in university, I still had a mentor during the first few months. He was a senior student at the university and he taught me a lot. The way we did code review was that I would do a small project, finish it by myself. If I was completely stuck I would ask for help. And then when it was done I sent him my code and he looked through it. Then we met up (either at school or voice call) and we went through the code together and he suggested ways to improve it or make it cleaner. If we did it over voice call I would share the code using VSCode LiveShare so both could edit the files.

4. Frontend or backend, whatever you find more fun/interesting. I have tried both and I very quickly realized that I did not like frontend, mainly because I don't like designing and making things look good. Data structures and algorithms are probably more common on the backend, but they have their uses on the frontend as well.

Hello 👋 first you need to decide what you wana do, you want a frontend job or a backend job ? Then you should focus on what you would be doing in that job, algoriths is good for practing the language but is not what people do their day to day work

Hey! It’s great that you want to become a FE dev! Don’t be stressed out by a lot of things, you will learn them over time. Start small. Make it work. Improve.

1. I don’t think that code cloning is something, which will allow you to grow a lot. First, because it can be boring and will quickly demotivate you to go on. Secondly, because not everything you copy is a code worth to learn from. Start with smaller projects and learn to read others code, by doing reviews or analyzing libraries you might be using.
2. Although math and algorithms might be a valuable investment for the future interviews, many companies would not emphasize the importance of them especially for the FE devs. In my opinion it’s more important to know FE frameworks or being able to bring design to live.
3. I dunno what happens in your region, but when I check LinkedIn I rarely see positions that require vanilla. I would suggest again to check out the Frameworks. Current situation on the local market might give you a clue which one to pick.
4. I have not had a mentor when I started, but now, after some years I see a value of them. A mentor can boost you a lot, but not having one, is not a big issue either.