Introduction

What is the Hanghae Plus Frontend course? It's a program for junior frontend developers with 1–4 years of experience. Every Saturday there's an in-person meetup with code reviews, and once a week there's a mentoring session — all designed to give junior developers an environment where they can genuinely grow.

We've crossed week 5 and week 6 has begun. Late as this reflection is, I want to look back on the halfway point of this 10-week course — why I signed up for Hanghae in the first place, and whether I'm actually on track. I think this is especially necessary precisely because I've left so much undone. Weeks 1 through 4 went well, but week 5 I completely stumbled, and I'm writing this to get my head back on straight.

Main

Become a developer who contributes to the company

A lot of thoughts have been running through my mind lately. I sometimes wonder whether I'm really growing well as a frontend developer. I think the root of that doubt is the fact that I've been viewing — and limiting — my career through a very narrow lens.

I had a one-on-one meeting with our CEO. He told me that my hunger for growth is a good thing, but I come across as impatient. I agreed with that completely. Someone once said that growth isn't something that happens overnight — it's the accumulation of problems solved. So I changed my goal.

From June to November last year, my goal was to build and launch a new business platform that could generate revenue. Starting this year, I want to shift that focus toward contribution. I want to quickly identify where I can contribute and then actually make it happen.

If I can contribute not just on the frontend but through backend development as well — even if I'm not up to speed yet — I want to keep moving forward with an emphasis on learning fast and contributing.

I think that's the right call. For now, I'm going to try.

Goals from before Hanghae vs. goals now

Five weeks ago, my goal was: "Apply as many things as possible to real work."

It was a goal I set with good intentions. I wanted to bring a lot of what I was learning into the projects we were running at the company, and the clean code and separation-of-concerns assignments did help me absorb the lessons and apply them when building new features.

But clean code and separation of concerns are things you have to continually wrestle with — they're not the kind of progress that shows up as a clear result in a short period of time. On top of that, I was rushing through the assignments, and even though there were countless things left to fix, I'd tell myself I was satisfied as long as I had applied something — anything — to real work, however small. And that's how five weeks slipped by.

I had a feeling that if I kept going this way, I'd finish Hanghae with a sense of unease. So I decided to change my goal. I shifted from "apply as many things as possible to real work" to "get All Pass on every remaining assignment." The assignments are genuinely high quality — I figured that if I focused on them fully, I'd gain a deeper understanding, which would inevitably lead to applying them in real work anyway.

I came to Hanghae hoping to get into test code and clean code. Time to reset and prepare for the upcoming test code assignments that are just around the corner.

Conclusion

Through this week 5 retrospective, I took the time to reset my goals. Looking back on the past five weeks: I reduced our internal project's LCP by 50%, and I rolled out eslint and prettier project-wide, renamed every variable and function, and restructured the entire folder layout to follow FSD architecture.

Lately I'm very aware of how much I still don't know — which means there's a lot left to learn. For the remaining five weeks, I'm committed to working through each assignment deeply, digesting what I pick up, and getting it all down on this blog. One more time, I'm making that promise to myself.

Keep going, everyone.