6 Technologies That Will Make You a Wanted Front-end Developer in 2021

How to choose your next move in your career, and turn it for the better

7 min readNov 30, 2020

Do you want to change your developer’s career for the better in 2021?

Maybe you want to move to a better-paying position. Or maybe you want to switch to a company working with the latest technologies.

I believe that improving your position as a developer is always possible. You just need to gain the right knowledge. The one that companies are looking for, the one that is the most paid and that fills out the Glassdoor jobs announcements.

“When I began my developer’s career, I was working with a lot of legacy projects involving Java. As time passed, however, my interest in JavaScript technologies grew, so I learned Node.
I knew that this technology was growing at the time. So it was super easy for me to change my employer, upgrading my salary and starting to work with a more modern tech stack.
Now, there was still a part of my job rotating around old AngularJS code. Yet, I knew that if I wanted to grow again and improve my position again, I had to switch to a newer technology. So I learned the basics of React.
Those basics allowed me to fulfil a position in the company I’m working for right now, where I’ve increasingly gained knowledge about this framework, which is highly marketable and has opened to me the doors for a lot more occasions.”

So you see, being a developer is also made of considerations like the one I just showed you. How can you be more marketable? What should you know to land a better position?

To answer these questions for you, I’ve created the list you will find below of technologies I’m convinced you should learn in 2021.

Master Vanilla JavaScript Inside Out

I’ve written an entire article about this. You don’t know how important it is to know vanilla JS thoroughly. It’s the foundation of all modern frameworks and technologies of the web. If you know it well, you can learn them faster, you can be free from future anxiety and ace coding interviews like a pro.

Knowing vanilla JS has become such a rarity that people get surprised when you can explain them what a closure is.

To give you more context: my team is currently looking for people to hire, we’re looking for a senior React developer, yet, all the questions posed to possible candidates are based on vanilla JS.

How can you explain to us a React hook if you can’t explain what a closure is?

Learn vanilla JS like a pro in 2021, and watch it take you where other developers can’t arrive.

TypeScript

TypeScript has continuously got more popular among developers in the past years. More than 80% of them admit that they would like to use or learn TypeScript in their next project.

It makes your code more robust and less error-prone. A great developing team backs it and great companies are looking for developers who can use it.

I can foresee that in the future, more and more positions will require this language to work with them. TypeScript is a synonym of an updated developer, who can work with the latest standards.

What are you waiting for to learn it?

GraphQL

If you’ve learned like me to code in the last 5 years, REST is probably the only standard for API’s you’ve used. But with applications becoming more complex every day, the need for a technology like GraphQL has risen.

GraphQL is query language on top of an API that allows developers to communicate more information about the data they send and receive.

There’s great interest in this technology, yet not many developers are using it. But with the increasingly numerous company requiring it for their positions, this language can be a little gem for you in acing the next code interview and land a dream job.

React.js

In 2020, React is still the most used framework regarding JavaScript. At this point, its popularity can only grow more and more. You should learn it in 2021 if you simply want to see thousands of more — better paying — job openings for you.

SCSS/SASS

Using CSS alone is now something out of fashion. The syntactic advantages introduced by technologies like SASS has taken over the way we write our frontends. So if you want to be more appetible for companies, show them that you are up-to-date with the latest standards by learning this technology.

Testing Tools (Jest, Mocha etc…)

Software errors across the world are so many that have built an economy themselves around bug hunting programs. Modern applications need to be tested thoroughly before getting sent to the final users. These apps also need to be flexible and adapt quickly to change, and the only way to do that is to have large test coverage of your source code.

Knowing how to build a suit of tests around an app is not an underrated skill anymore. It’s something companies are dying for in their candidates.

Conclusion

I manage my dev career like a game of chess. In every moment, I like to think about what I can understand and what knowledge I need to make my next move a winning one.

Hope you found an interesting point in this approach, and that you will feel motivated to pursue new occasions in 2021.