From Lagos to London: Notes on Growing as a Frontend Engineer

I started building websites in a Lagos cyber café. Ten years later I lead frontend architecture for a London product team. A few things mattered more than any framework.

Write things down

Design docs, decision records and good pull-request descriptions made my thinking visible long before my title changed.

Learn the platform

Frameworks change; HTML, accessibility and the browser's rendering pipeline do not.

Mentor early

Explaining something is the fastest way to find out you don't fully understand it.

Find your people

The engineers who reviewed my code honestly changed my career. Communities like this one exist to make that easier.