In a nutshell, for me, it's about the knowledge and experience in designing and building successful, accessible user interfaces, using a variety and combination of the right tools for the right job.
However, I think people get bogged down in talking about the tools that define the term, rather than the role, i.e. what it is the front end developer needs to achieve.
We've talked in this thread about changing the term and because the tools involved in modern front end are blurring a lot, the title itself almost needs to become something like 'user-driven developer' or 'interface developer' — something beyond this idea of a 'front end'.
But think about it in terms of other jobs out in the world, like, say a plumber. A plumber deals with your waterworks and pipes, right? We don't talk about, 'oh, you have to know how to use a blow torch, or this shiny new spanner to be a plumber' do we? We talk about the processes and skills involved instead.
Development is such a broad collection of venn diagrams to me, all overlapping, and you can choose where you live in those diagrams depending on your passion, depending on your role. You absolutely can be a FE dev without touching a line of CSS, but you're likely going to be fairly niche. Similarly, you can be a successful FE developer that specialises in HTML and CSS, but with fairly little JS. It all depends on what your doing...
Great answer, I just wanted to raise some awareness especially to newcomers that one can be a front-end developer without knowing React ... but the places he/she could be employed in based on open job positions is rather limited (quite sadly, lots of open positions asking for front-end developers actually are positions for React developers)
I would call knowledge in React a specialization, but basic knowledge in CSS should be fairly standard in my opinion.
Great question!
In a nutshell, for me, it's about the knowledge and experience in designing and building successful, accessible user interfaces, using a variety and combination of the right tools for the right job.
However, I think people get bogged down in talking about the tools that define the term, rather than the role, i.e. what it is the front end developer needs to achieve.
We've talked in this thread about changing the term and because the tools involved in modern front end are blurring a lot, the title itself almost needs to become something like 'user-driven developer' or 'interface developer' — something beyond this idea of a 'front end'.
But think about it in terms of other jobs out in the world, like, say a plumber. A plumber deals with your waterworks and pipes, right? We don't talk about, 'oh, you have to know how to use a blow torch, or this shiny new spanner to be a plumber' do we? We talk about the processes and skills involved instead.
Development is such a broad collection of venn diagrams to me, all overlapping, and you can choose where you live in those diagrams depending on your passion, depending on your role. You absolutely can be a FE dev without touching a line of CSS, but you're likely going to be fairly niche. Similarly, you can be a successful FE developer that specialises in HTML and CSS, but with fairly little JS. It all depends on what your doing...
Great answer, I just wanted to raise some awareness especially to newcomers that one can be a front-end developer without knowing React ... but the places he/she could be employed in based on open job positions is rather limited (quite sadly, lots of open positions asking for front-end developers actually are positions for React developers)
I would call knowledge in React a specialization, but basic knowledge in CSS should be fairly standard in my opinion.
I agree. The holy trinity of CSS, HTML and JS are key, core concepts in front end.