Before We Begin

(The sky from the office at 4 PM on March 3rd)

I'm wrapping up 10 weeks of hanghae — 10 weeks that taught me hard lessons about what to let go and what to hold on to. From React internals to clean code, test code, and performance optimization, I picked up a lot along the way.

The reason I joined was a year-end review at the end of 2024 that made me realize I needed to get back to fundamentals. My goals going in were straightforward:

Strengthen the fundamentals (React, JavaScript, TypeScript, etc.)
Learn techniques I could actually apply at work

I kept those two goals in front of me the whole time. I stumbled and wanted to quit every week, but I kept coming back with a fresh mindset.

The Main Story

Graduation Ceremony

I couldn't make it to the in-person graduation ceremony, and that sat a little uneasy with me. I wanted to share the sense of accomplishment after ten weeks of sprinting alongside my cohort — but something came up unexpectedly with my grandmother that I needed to take care of, so I quietly looked back on those ten weeks on my own instead.

Hanghae Is Genuinely Intense

Weeks 2, 5, and 8 all happened to overlap with major feature deployments at work. That meant I couldn't put as much time into the assignments as I wanted — sometimes I barely scraped a submission in, and a few times I missed entirely. It triggered a lot of doubt. But every time, I came back to why I'd signed up in the first place.

Find the spots where this applies at work… and actually apply it!

If you're thinking about joining, having a clear personal goal and direction will keep you from getting shaken as easily. For me, I came away with three concrete outcomes:

I refactored one of our internal projects using FSD (Feature-Sliced Design). Going through the process also deepened my overall understanding of the project itself.
I introduced unit tests and integration tests for authentication and key business logic. That work made it possible to refactor with confidence.
I built a CI/CD pipeline for our backend — replacing a manual process where a colleague was deploying zip files to Elastic Beanstalk by hand, one at a time.

These three things all made it into production. Hanghae is over, but I plan to write up exactly how I applied each of them and what changed as a result.

Time Management Is Life

(Week 1 Google Calendar time allocation)

Week 1 went according to plan… but it got harder from there.

Between work, hanghae, and everything else going on in my life, time management became genuinely difficult. Around week 5, I could feel that something had to change, so I reached out to my mentor for help. He suggested a few approaches, and I ended up using a time tracker from a YouTuber called 면접왕 이형 to realign my schedule and reset my priorities.

(February monthly goal page from the time tracker)

February was chaotic. It wasn't often that I'd lost this much clarity on what to do first and how to sequence things — but trying to run so many things in parallel made it clear I needed a different approach to organizing my life.

What surprised me was how much difference it made. Once I started using the time tracker from February onward — setting goals and being intentional about my time — I felt like I got my life back to something simple.

Working at a small startup means you're constantly expected to find work yourself, drive improvements, and ship features proactively. That requires you to manage yourself. Without that, you risk being neither useful to the company nor to yourself. I realized that in order to contribute meaningfully to work, I need to be in order first.

I started using the time tracker to focus more on hanghae, but it ended up having a much bigger effect on the quality of my actual work hours.

Hanghae Plus Frontend Course — Q&A

I've had several people reach out on LinkedIn with questions about the Hanghae Plus Frontend course, so I'm putting together a consolidated set of answers here.

1. Who would you recommend this course to?

Personally, I wouldn't recommend it to people at early-stage startups or anyone who genuinely can't carve out time on weekday evenings — I saw a lot of people struggling and burning out. I'd recommend it to people who have the will and the space to show up on weekday evenings consistently. Weekday assignments and mentoring sessions gave me far more than the Saturday in-person sessions, so having that free time after work is really the key factor.

There's also resume feedback available during the weekly mentoring sessions, so if you're thinking about your career — especially switching jobs — this is a good fit.

If your company workload is manageable, and you're willing to trade evenings for a focused assignment schedule, go for it.

2. How did you manage your time?

Honestly, a little embarrassingly... I struggled with time management from around week 5. In hindsight, it might be more accurate to say I struggled with energy management. The solution that worked for me was using a time tracker to analyze where my time was actually going and realigning my goals around that.

3. What does a typical weekday look like?

Weekdays are mostly assignments. Each week, teams coordinate to find a time slot for a one-hour mentoring session together.

Since there are two assignments each week — a standard one and an advanced one — most people do the standard assignment on Monday and Tuesday, then the advanced one on Wednesday and Thursday. That leaves Friday open.

Mon/Tue: standard assignment — Wed/Thu: advanced assignment — Weekly one-on-one mentoring coordinated around team availability

Wrapping Up

Ten weeks of giving it everything I had, and there's still plenty I wish I'd done better. That said, the Hanghae Plus Frontend course gave me a lot — and I actually put that learning to work at my company.

Hanghae is done, but I'm finally in a place where I can chew on things more thoroughly. I'm going to go back and properly document what I did with FSD, test code, and React, apply more of it internally, and come back with the writeups.

Wherever you are — keep going!