I used to. Way back when I first started learning (~10 years ago). Although there comes a point as a front-end developer where you want to build something other than static web pages.
Thus you eventually take a step into the back-end. I found it's not so bad. Actually, I discovered to like the back-end more. CSS is pain. Design is a pain. Although it can be fun sometimes as a form of artistic creativity.
> how do you handle those requests
>Do you give it a try or refuse or recommend someone else
Honestly, I'd be surprised if someone in the current year is strictly a front-end developer. Do they still exist? I'd consider getting someone on your team that is familiar with the entire tech stack.
Yup ignore it. Front-end dev is super complex these days! I started when it was just HTML/CSS. JavaScript dev these days is much more complex than some 'real' programming languages!
HTML was never gone :)
I have and still working on big e-commerce websites.
For example, Ikea for product lists sends mini chunks of simple HTML. No JS involved.
What I see is the problem that people think that "Frontend development is easier than backend development".
For me, they have different challenges and different ways of thinking. Getting a good full stack developer is kind of getting a good doctor, which has at least to specialities.
It depends upon what kind of code you develop. If you do any front end work you really do need to code it from scratch. If you do back end or native client development you don't need to showcase your javascript and css3 skills so you could get away with anything you like that works for you. But if you touch front end web development or want to be involved it really sets you back to not have some kind of examples of your work that are your own original work.
I've been a web developer for 15 years now. Building the UI is always hard and where the waste of time is felt the most. That's why i prefer to work on the backend as much as i can.
I'm against the front x back end split. I think any web dev need to know html, css and js. That's mandatory. Besides that, you should definetely learn the server side too, specially databases, since they'are by far the biggest bottleneck and performance hog you'll need to optimize.
But I'm getting old and I know that because I think everything new is stupid. Once upon a time, we had RAD tools to build UI's, but unfortunately, that's lost in the past...
You probably can do it, but should you? You can build a house using only cardboard, or write a book using only words shorter than six letters. The result is not simplicity, though. The result is an idiosyncratic oddity that will have you swimming upstream, something no one else can understand, with huge usability and interoperability problems.
You can’t get around the unfortunate fact that web browsers only render HTML, CSS, and Javascript. Yes, the front-end landscape is a complicated mess, and it takes time to learn. Many frameworks and libraries exist to abstract and hide a lot of the mess — take your pick. Eventually you either understand and can work with HTML, CSS, and JS or you don’t. If you don’t you will limit what you can accomplish, and your job prospects.
It depends if you are programming or simply describing page layout. Front end development could also include things like Javascript. There are plenty of designers who are not Javascript programmers but who can use CSS etc.
Until recently, front end development meant knowing how to use HTML and CSS, same thing with web design.
I remember in ~2013 telling someone who was getting into web design that they should also focus on learning JavaScript, or even CoffeeScript, because just HTML and CSS weren't going to cut it in the future.
I also remember getting into a discussion with a manager in ~2018 who opined that they liked the fact that front end development now meant having to understand JavaScript, and things like React, because it meant they could hire "real engineers" for the front end.
I'm not a fan of that trend, and still kind of lament that a lot of people were forced out of web development because they didn't see the writing on the wall. And I can't really blame them, because at the time, schools were still selling students on web dev & design tracts that strayed away from traditional CS, and focused more on HTML, CSS and UI/UX over programming.
I've been away from front-end web development for a while now. I've been doing steadily less of it over the years, and by now it's probably been 4 years since I've touched it at all. As memory serves, the last project was gulp, typescript, SASS, and still jQuery.
When the front-end work began to fork off into it's own real separate independent discipline, likely when we really achieved separation of the UI from the backend, things started to change and I ended up having to make a choice. With front-end build tools, CSS processing libraries, larger frameworks like React/Angular, I ended up on the back-end side of the equation - data platforms, databases, web services, application logic, integrations, infrastructure, etc.
Seeing this reminded me of how much fun front-end development was, even with having to deal with the annoying quirks of HTML, CSS, JS and all the browsers.
Did anybody else, like me, suddenly have a real hankering to sit down and break out all the new HTML/CSS/JS toys and start playing? :)
I'd say a lot of back-end devs feel the same way about the front-end. I mean, how many JS developers know how to make their CSS work without using !important all over the place?
It's all anecdotes, but in my experience native devs are by far more willing to step outside of their area of expertise and use the right tool for the job when building for the web. Yeah they'll groan, but at the end of the day they realize that HTML+CSS+JS is how web front end works and so they write that. Very few bother compiling their favored language to JS or asm.js or whatever because it adds an unnecessary step/level of indirection and feels like trying to use a hammer as a handsaw.
By comparison web front end devs tend to cling much more tightly to their favored language+toolchain, taking it with them to every platform they decide to develop for.
This is something. I remember times when inline styling was the thing. I have started my journey with web development. Then I left, busy with high school social life. Then, at the university I came back. And everything has changed: css files, some crazy JavaScript + jQuery effects etc. And now here we are: front-end development is heavily focused on JavaScript only, powered by frameworks. Time flies like crazy.
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