99% of IT recruiters are playing a numbers game. That is, they are not taking the time to study candidates and reach out to those who actually fit the job description , choosing to take a rapid-fire, buckshot (a.k.a. spam) approach instead. You'd be surprised how many emails I get for PHP, Java, Ruby, or Python positions which require 5+ years experience in the given language. I am a JavaScript developer with little experience in any of these languages... something that a 30 second once over of my GitHub / LinkedIn would make very clear. 99% of IT recruiters will waste your time filling out tables with 10 - 15 fields for things like your updated email, best contact number, years of experience in x, y, and z... all of which were listed on the updated resume I literally just emailed to them. The #1 rule in development is Don't Repeat Yourself . If I have taken the time to craft an updated resume, do not ask me to repeat myself and put the same information in a table for you. I have other things to do with my time... you can take a few minutes and pull that information yourself. 99% of IT recruiters do not know the true needs of the client. This is partly the fault of the hiring manager / senior developer who handed the requirement to the recruiter, but if you're going to be a head hunter, odds are it is worth your time to get to know the client, cut threw all the bs, and find out what they really need . I've gotten requirements that were two pages long with all these technologies and years of experience for 40 different things... it is not realistic for anyone to be an expert in so many technologies, and you'll probably end up hiring someone who is great at everything but the main thing you needed them to be great at. The 99% thing isn't gospel... and honestly is probably far from the truth, but for myself and others it truly feels that way @ times. IT recruiters are both a gift and a curse. IT is one the few fields were one could never apply for a job and STILL get hounded with offers for jobs making $50 - $70+ per hour; all this without a college degree. On the other hand, some recruiters use spam tactics and don't respect our time. It would be nice if more IT recruiters approached their job with the same quality and attention to detail as the professionals they're trying to recruit. The industry as a whole would be the better for it.

Build. Build. Build. The best advice I can give you is to constantly build and ship projects. It doesn't matter what, as long as they do things that are interesting to you. Do not build something just because you think it will be "easy". Don't even waste your time trying to assess your skills... just start with a cool idea, then figure out how to do it. A simple hack to build lots of projects is to use project based tutorials as a starting point. These tutorials will walk you step-by-step through building a simple program / app, but don't be content with just following along... extend the application past what was done in the tutorial. Better yet, build something else that has a similar structure but does something totally different. I've kept myself entertained for hours and really upped my skills by doing this :)

Sorry, missed your reply Etienne. The only thing I can really share at the moment is my personal website: xavierduncan.com I built this site with Skeleton. The design is minimal and tiny in terms of size + http requests (very few images, minimal JavaScript, etc..) so I didn't bother coding it in React or Angular. I have two projects I'm working on now, one in React, the other using Vue. Will post them here once completed!

Nice!

Text Editor: Atom + Visual Studio Code TDD / Testing: Jasmine CSS Libraries: Skeleton or w3.css, as Bootstrap is overkill for a lot of my projects. Front End: Angular 2 or React. Vue.js is nice as well, an alternative to React. Debugging: Chrome Dev Tools + Firebug Languages: JavaScript, the swiss army knife of modern development :)

Skeleton is the only one I've tried on this list and I love it. It's the framework I used to build my personal website. w3.css is another small framework that's worth a mention. It's not as small as the others, but it includes a custom version of normalize.css and follows the material design style. I use it for a lot of my client websites where something like Skeleton would be to light and Bootstrap / Foundation would be overkill. It's a nice middle ground of two extremes.

I agree with Jakob Lind In terms of just learning the practical parts of JS, try to deconstruct the language into the most important chunks needed to build an application. When I went about learning JS, those were: 1) Data Types: Strings, Numbers, Booleans, Objects, Arrays (which are treated as objects in JS), Null, and Undefined. 2) Operators: Assignment, Add, Subtract, Multiply, Divide, Modulus 3) Type Coercion: toString, toNumber 4) JSON: key/value pairs, parse, stringify 5) Functions and how to invoke them. 6) Callbacks & "Callback Hell" 7) Scope and Closures 8) Prototype Based Inheritance By focusing on these 8 things, you'll have a nice grasp on vanilla JS in a couple of weeks. But you must apply this knowledge and actually build something. If you need a road map, checkout freeCodeCamp or The Odin Project (focus on The Front End section). They do enough hand holding so you're not completely lost, but you'll ultimately have to figure out the solutions yourself. Hope that helps :)

Very nice article Marcus, inspired me immensely. You're going to make a great professor when the time comes! Best of luck on your journey.

Spot on.

Definitely over used, to the extreme. I have pondered this myself. Funny thing is, (a) I am guilty of following this trope as well and (b) I have yet to see a good portfolio that doesn't start this way. It's almost as if using this wording means you have graduated to a certain level of skill lol... I tried to switch mine up a little though, by having my "Hi / Hello" iterate through different translations (Hola, Bonjour, etc..) Same shit, different languages :)