Front End Now — Career programs
Co-founded a career program with a full learning platform — Syntax Arena gamified practice, multi-file Code Sandbox, student admin, and coaching systems that help beginners land frontend roles.
What Front End Now is
I co-founded Front End Now to solve the real bottleneck beginners hit: not motivation — direction. Most people don't fail because they're incapable; they fail because they optimise the wrong things too early.
The program isn't just curriculum and calls. I built and maintain the learning platform students use daily — gamified practice, in-browser editors, progress tracking, and the admin tooling coaches rely on to run cohorts at scale. Students have landed 70+ job offers (aggregate outcome — individual timelines vary).
Marketing site — trust before signup
The public site has to earn trust before anyone books a call. I designed pages that answer the questions beginners actually ask — who coaches them, how to spot a bad bootcamp, and what support looks like day to day.
The Coach page puts credentials front and centre: experience timeline, client logos, and a straight biography so applicants know who they're learning from.
The Difference page is a bootcamp comparison checklist — red flags, results, teaching quality, support, and guarantees — so prospects can evaluate any program, not just ours.
FAQ handles the long tail: beginners, AI, time commitment, geography, and coaching access — laid out as an expandable grid so answers stay scannable.
Syntax Arena — gamified practice
Syntax Arena is the core practice engine: track-based questions across HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Git, Terminal, and more. Each track splits into Easy, Medium, and Hard tiers with progress gates — you unlock harder difficulty only after demonstrating mastery.
The arena home surfaces where you left off, filterable track grids, and a live leaderboard so practice feels like a game without sacrificing rigour.
Each technology track has its own landing page with difficulty cards, completion stats, and unlock rules. CSS, for example, walks from selectors and the box model through flexbox, grid, and responsive patterns.
Interactive lessons — teach, then practice
Questions aren't abstract multiple choice. Each lesson explains what you'll learn, why it matters, and how it works, then drops you into a live editor with instant preview. Students write real selectors and see the DOM update immediately.
That split-pane pattern keeps beginners from guessing: they read the concept, apply it in code, and validate against a rendered result in the same screen.
Code Sandbox — multi-file playground
Beyond guided questions, students get a full Code Sandbox with HTML, CSS, JS, JSX, TSX, and TypeScript tabs, a live preview, and a console for debugging. It's the environment they use when they need to experiment freely or build portfolio pieces.
Student platform & admin
Running a cohort means more than content. I built admin surfaces for student management — search, filter by status and program type, export data, and drill into individual records for coaching, funding, and placement tracking.
Individual student dashboards consolidate programme details, coach assignment, course dates, and profile links — the operational view coaches use when supporting someone through the program.
Students customise their own profiles too — contact details, location, portfolio links, and avatar settings — so coaches and peers see a consistent identity across the platform.
Content & programme tiers
The platform also powers public-facing content. Admins can create and schedule posts for the /posts section without touching code.
Programme tiers — Group, Pro, Elite, and Fast Track — are compared side by side with mentorship, curriculum, and support differences spelled out clearly. That transparency matters when people are making a serious career bet.
What I actually do
- Tight feedback loops — daily support beats passive content consumption.
- Translate hiring reality — what teams evaluate in portfolios, interviews, and take-home work.
- Keep standards modern — the frontend toolchain moves; curriculum and platform have to move with it.
- Product & platform — Syntax Arena, Code Sandbox, admin tooling, and the community infrastructure that keeps the program running.
Curriculum & coaching
The program covers the modern frontend stack — HTML, CSS, JavaScript, React, Next.js, TypeScript — with an emphasis on shipping credible UI and explaining trade-offs like an engineer. Students earn while they learn and get placed into internships where AI-assisted development is part of the workflow, not a shortcut around fundamentals.
Philosophy (short)
Coding is boring and hard at the beginning — that's normal. My job is to keep people from quitting in the worst possible window: right after it gets confusing. The platform exists to make that window survivable: structured practice, visible progress, and tooling that respects how beginners actually learn.