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I’m Michael. I was a principal engineer at Facebook from 2009 to 2017, where I was the top code contributor of all time and also conducted hundreds of interviews. I recently co-founded Formation.dev, an engineering fellowship that trains and refers engineers directly into big tech. Ask me Anything!

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u/Mana-Elixir wrote (the comment Michael replied to):

I’m teaching myself front-end development to start and also plan on learning .node. Apart from HTML,CSS,JS, and .node, do you have anything else you would recommend ? I obviously plan to learn more than just that and go into backend as well, but I’m breaking it into steps for my

u/michaelnovati replied · ★ FEATURED
Hey, I think that's a great stack to start with and plenty to get into your first role. I wouldn't go too deep into too many different things and I would recommend being better at a smaller number of things for your first job. Demonstrating a little deeper expertise/experience in one area will be more impressive than broad and shallow. I would recommend being really good with building projects in a single page React app, focusing on depth in React, and passable with CSS. On the backend, being able to run a node server with a simple API that the frontend calls and being familiar with a few different ways to store data would be good: e.g. SQL, Firebase, MongoDB