It's a discussion I am often having with colleagues. From the perspective of others, front-end devs just juggle a bit HTML and CSS, maybe add a bit of the weird and inferior "JS" language by copying some bad and bulky code from the web. Well, ok, that's exaggerated, however, I often have the feeling, that people who have don't do the job don't understand how it has grown, and often want us to do things which require expert-level knowledge in diverse areas:
All these technologies and knowledge keep piling up, and it gets harder and harder to keep up with current developments. The world is turning faster and faster, and we are expected to developer ever richer and better applications all the time, in shorter times than ever, or else someone else will fill the gap or the interest dissipates.
What do you think is the future? Will there be more types of front-end developers, like graphic front-end developers, network front-end developers, etc.? Will we see more complex frameworks to automate and hide functionalities? Maybe something completely different? How do software companies solve the problem?
Maximilian Berkmann
Web and programming
I really hope that more developers would focus on the roots of web development: HTML and CSS. In the past years the whole JS thing got bigger and bigger and you see so much simple and small websites being developed with React, Vue or whatever fancy framework is trendy right now. Only a small portion of sites really need a full-JS frontend that communicates with the backend via APIs.
Development of progressive web apps makes a lot of sense and should be done more, and JS being used to add extra functionality and not the other way round.
I'm hoping we see a clearer separation of UI development and JavaScript Backend development. Currently the two are uncomfortably and unhelpfully conflated, which is how you get UI devs being asked to write complex business logic; or backend devs being asked to fix a stylesheet.
While it's entirely possible for one person to do both, it's much more common for people to focus on one or the other.
Assuming WASM has the success it seems headed towards, I think this may happen pretty naturally. Many devs writing JavaScript are only doing so because they had to; and will very quickly move back out to more-suitable backend languages that compile to WASM (technically they could do it now with JS transpilation but it doesn't have the performance gains of WASM).
But speculation is always a bit pointless ;)
HTML is now in JS 😀
CSS is now in JS 🤪
Rendering is now in JS 😂
Everywhere it's JS now! 🤭
Where will be JS in 2020? 🤔
I certainly understand this and this is why the full stack role came into place but i think really what needs to happen is they need to break it down into smaller sections and find a solution to it all!
It's a shopping list, even with me on the backend, still not even enough to land a basic junior role! 🙄
Well, I guess the notable elements of the future in FE development would be: