What Makes a Good Front-End Developer?

While I am ostensibly a "full-stack" web developer, it's no secret that I'm not particulary fond of the front-end. In large part, this may be because the world seems to be full of bad front-end developers, who by and large are fantastic at building crappy versions of desktop apps inside a browser, but are incredibly bad at building things which are truly of the web.

What makes a good front-end developer? I asked @janiukjf this after her presentation at the ExperiencingUX meetup last night, and she says part of it is a willingness to stay up to date with the constantly-popping-up front end frameworks. And certainly, the front-end changes quickly and it's hard to keep up.

But do we need to keep up? I'm not convinced we do.

After all: a regular form post has worked since the 90s. It's not going to stop working! We built websites without CSS for years―CSS is a wonderful addition, but if your website is nonsensical without CSS, it'll be nonsensical in a text-only browser. It will potentially be less useful to a screen-reader (an h1 and a div with an enlarged font are likely to be expressed differently) or other assistive technology. But even with CSS, you don't have to be on the cutting edge to do useful, beautiful things. In fact it probably helps to avoid being on the forefront: older CSS tends to work better and in more browsers.

And then there's JavaScript: the easiest way to turn a browser into a fragile, distributed computing environment. We built websites without JS for over a decade, and eschewing megabytes of JavaScript to display basic text would greatly improve the speed of the web. Properly applied, JavaScript can be used to do amazing things, but there's no shame in making a simple line-of-business CRUD app out of plain ol' 90s-era forms if that's all it really needs.

So what makes a good front-end developer? I think it's embracing the limitations of the web. It's understanding that the web isn't a pixel-perfect medium; that sometimes your images or fonts or styles or scripts won't load and you have to handle that; it's understanding that the web is populated not just by developers with the latest Macbook and ten-year-olds with iPhones, but also little old ladies with dusty old Gateway computers and cheap faded monitors, and the web should work for all of them. It's understanding that the browser is a hostile computing environment in which anything we tell it to do is a mere suggestion and if we break when it doesn't that is our fault and we need to handle it.

And quite frankly, that's really hard.