I previously wrote about the stuff I don’t know, because no matter how much experience you may have there are always going to be gaps in your knowledge; and that’s a good thing. Being aware of what you don’t know allows you to put yourself on the right path to fill those gaps if you choose.

But here I’d like to celebrate some of the stuff I do know and why I prefer to focus and become an expert in a handful of areas rather than try and learn everything.

Front-end Development

Sure, this is a broad topic but my point here is that I focus on being the best front-end Developer I can. Not back-end. Not full-stack. Just a solid and broad understanding of the parts you see and interact with on the web and how to make them as enjoyable to use as possible.

Being a SME in Front-end technologies has given me more authority and autonomy within my team and allows me to do more exploratory work on our application.

Being Full-stack is great but remember that the ‘Jack of all trades’ saying exists for a reason.

Accessibility

While I personally don’t require any assistive technology to surf the web, around 1 in 5 people globally do. That’s over 13 million people in the UK, and over 65 million in the US.

With that said, ensuring that the products we create are accessible should be one of our top priorities.

I’ve been an accessibility advocate for several years now and firmly belive that the web should be open and accessible to as many people as possible.

UX

Having started my career as a designer I understand the importance of a good user experience. Most of what we build on the web is for our users to achieve a particular goal, whether that be buying a product, researching a topic or communicating with friends. Users all have different needs and skills so its important to create experiences which help the user achieve their goal, while also making the journey enjoyable.

Performance

I’m from the generation which used to ask “how will this work without JavaScript” and “how will this run on a dial-up connection.” These questions were a catalyst for building websites which were light-weight and performant.

Today, broadband speeds are rarely an issue and everything is JavaScript, but it’s still as important as ever to optimise for performance by keeping the fundamentals in check. Semantic HTML, minification and bundling, image optimisation, caching and load-balancing to name a few.