Frontend in Commercial Development: First 6 Months, Expectations vs Reality

Hey! I'm a frontend developer at ByteMinds. It's been six months since I joined the team and first encountered real production code. Before this, my experience consisted of pet projects and courses where everything was usually "sterile." In this article, I want to share not just impressions, but real experience of "surviving" in a commercial project. This is an honest story of what to be prepared for if you're looking for your first job. The Stack: Expectation vs Reality When I was studying, I thought projects picked one modern framework (like React) and everything was strictly built with it. In the "ideal world" of tutorials, that's exactly how it works. Reality: In commercial development, it's different. Right now I'm working on projects managed by CMS platforms (Umbraco and Optimizely). These systems are built on .NET , where most of the frontend is rendered server-side through Razor templates (CSHTML) . In this architecture, React isn't the "king" of the entire project. It's used s