What is Front-End Development?

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

What is front-end development or what is a front-end developer?

This one is pretty easy to describe but it has a lot more complexity to it compared to a back-end developer just because of the amount of things that are going on.

A front-end developer essentially is responsible for the parts of the code that are being interpreted and used by the browser. Generally this is going to be HTML, CSS, and Javascript. That sounds simple right? There’s only three different things. How hard could it be?

The truth is that front-end development has absolutely exploded over the last 15 years or so. Back in the day, it used to be really easy to make an html web page with some CSS to style it up and then Javascript for a little bit of interactivity.

But nowadays, Javascript has absolutely taken off and has made the landscape entirely different. There are dozens of different Javascript frameworks and there are CSS preprocessors and there are HTML building frameworks and everything else under the sun that makes the front end do a ton of different things.

Another thing to consider when you’re trying to decide between front end and back end for your career path is that front-end developers have to think about a lot more variables. A back-end developer really has their stuff installed on a server and the server spits out the answer. If it works once, it’s probably going to work forever and ever.

With a front-end developer you have five different major browsers, you have smartphones, different form factor and sizes, you have different versions of browsers, and different versions of javascript. Essentially a bunch of different things that can happen all at the same time and you have to consider all of them.

When you’re looking at an application in total there’s a ton more testing and there’s a lot larger learning curve when it comes to overcoming all of the front-end stuff that you can learn. Especially with javascript frameworks.

That’s about all i have on this topic! Thanks for stopping by and, until next time, happy coding!