A few questions about work, what would you advise?

Question

css

Good afternoon. I am now 24 years old, I have a higher education in IT. I want to become a front-end developer. For the last 5 years, so to speak, I have been a webmaster-seoshnik, and I earned money on my sites on this. And all this time, of course, I was interested in SEO optimization, promotion, the main thing for me was that positions in the search results grew, traffic grew, people clicked on ads and links were sold :) I made my sites on DLE (at that time it was the easiest) and sometimes I made up the template for them is in HTML + CSS, so for the last year I have been studying javascript and everything related to the front-end. But somehow I got tired of being a "webmaster", being able to do everything and at the same time nothing, tired of SEO, I want to become a specialist in some area. and a year ago I realized that javascript, interfaces and everything like that is very attractive. Therefore, I have a slightly non-standard situation,

1. Since, in fact, I made the first template about 5 years ago, and I got acquainted with site building even more than 5 years ago, the main goal was to promote sites and I was interested in this. Therefore, it turns out that in 5 years I practically did not grow as a front-end developer (I didn’t think that I would ever want to be one), and many employers may be confused by this, they say, after 5 years you could become a senior, and if in 5 years of working with sites, I only recently had a desire to learn js and all technologies, which means it's not mine or something like that...

2.I have a so-called pet project on dle, which is also about 5 years old, now it is the most popular fan site in its field with about 6K daily visitors, its own community, etc. That is, the site lives without me, I go to it at most once a week, users themselves write news, editors publish them, etc. It now has a nice template that I once made, but it is not adaptive and there are quite a few moments in writing css, etc. I'm thinking of making a responsive design for it and fixing the bad points in css writing and presenting it in the portfolio... do you think it's worth it, or is it better not to show it at all? Again, I know that employers do not want to hire people with their own projects so that they do not deal with them at work ... (I'm not going to do this)

3.I study SASS and LESS, somehow I switched to them very easily, but maybe I just have delusions. So I'm wondering if I'm using variables for colors and indenting there, using mixins, imports, autoprefixers, color dimming functions, etc. is it possible to write in the summary that I know preprocessors? Or what is considered to mean them? In general, where is the line when you can write in a resume that I know some kind of technology? For example, I wrote a primitive table parser in php without knowing php, but this is not a reason to write in a resume

4.I have a goal to move to another country, but judging by the statistics of front-end developers, they give h1b visas quite a bit or even just invite them to work in another country (Europe for example), more java, etc. On the one hand, I really like the front-end (and everything related to js - node.js, mongodb etc) and after all there is some experience in it, on the other hand, with java or asp.net, the chances are 100 times greater, as they are much more in short supply. And somehow, many do not consider front-end developers to be programmers, like it's easier, like php, for example

5.openness education. There are many video tips where I learn very well to read the source code of popular products, as they are written and developed by experienced programmers. How did you start doing this, I tried to look at the underscore and jquery sources with comments, google what specific functions do, but I understood why the code works very hard, I can understand some separate parts, but somehow I can’t catch all the logic (like I went through many courses on js, now I’m still reading a book, and I’m writing something extraordinary in vanilla js myself, but it’s still not enough to read open source (Someone came across this, maybe you can advise something ... the same css to read everyone there are no sliders, no menu templates...(

Answer 1

5 year old Senior is a laughing matter for chickens. Who then is 30 years old - is this already god-level?
To move to another country, you need a diploma in a specialty + documented experience.
I don't know, but in our country they don't teach the web. I don't know what they teach in our country.
I advise you to develop, you don’t need to read open source, this is not bad literature.
Just set tasks for yourself, and try to solve them within your competence, if it doesn’t work out, look for those technologies that will allow you to solve your problems.

Answer 2

1. You haven't done front-end for 5 years, you've been doing SEO/marketing. Yes, it may seem strange that they didn’t immediately program with an IT specialty, but anything can happen
2. Employers treat their projects adequately only to those that do not bring money. For example, a collection of small useless apps on Google Play without an audience is great. You can post the template as a demo.
3. you can write what you know
4. Master 2 technologies, work with relocation often in related areas.
5. Return to comprehension checks periodically, or study directly the solutions you are working with. no need to specifically read the code of libraries that do not belong to your projects

Answer 3

You can try h1b to the states through a bodyshop, for example, this one . By the way, you didn't write if you have a wife/children. Because a trip through a bodyshop implies a very low salary for the region and draconian penalties in case of a change of employer, having those who need to be supported will be very unsweetened.
But if you don’t understand how jquery and underscore work, it won’t take you 5 years of experience, it’s actually an internship position, it’s very difficult to find one.

Answer 4

gee wrote so much, probably no one read to the end - a lot of very guesses and doubts :) for trying to knock on public opinion respect ++; but in general, I think that it is possible to change languages ​​and specialization at least at 35, the main thing is that this is an addition to past experience and then there will be a result. in general, if you are tired of SEO - fuck it, and this is even logical. but experience in SEO is also experience, so don’t worry and take on some complex and interesting projects - if your hands grow from the right place and the experience was in the subject, what’s the difference what happened before? the main thing is that you like it and succeed, but you can live normally in Russia. IMHO