In 10 days I do my first year as a Frontend Developer and although I like the change very much, it was not easy to take the first step.

When I made the decision to be a Frontend Developer I didn’t know how to start. Should I ask for some web design tasks in my company being a backend developer? Should I do personal sites to keep improving and then jump to the other side of the web? Should I apply for jobs and improve by doing?

It took 9 months since I finished my web design course until I get a job as a Frontend Developer and in those months I didn’t do a lot of improvement. However, since I am a Frontend developer I have done another website using Bootstrap, I started some Jekyll blogs and did my portfolio, I learnt AngularJS, used Yeoman and Grunt, I have done the responsive web designs of a virtual assistant with JQuery animations and a search page with a lot of functionality, I have done e2e tests with Protractor and I have learnt Inkscape and a little about graphic design theory.

So, if I could read again the pros/cons list that I told myself in June 2014, I would say that the majority of the pros were fears that haven’t happened: what if I make a mistake with the decision, I am not good at frontend developer, I don’t fit in the new company? The reality is that you can change again if you are not happy with the decision, but you can win a lot if you don’t follow your fears.

And what now? What do I want to do after being where I wanted to be in that June 2014? After a year in a new role? I would like to have models to follow and improve myself in what I do. I want to learn new and better ways of doing web design. I want to do some creative designs from scratch. I want to learn UX and understand more the designs that I code. And for all of that I need to take the first step again.