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What's the future of front-end web-development?

Marco Alka's photo
Marco Alka
·Feb 13, 2019

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:

  • API architecture, for when we have to write a whole library in order to communicate with the back-end in a sane way in a web app
  • WebGL, we have to know about computer graphics and how to write shaders, because they want fancy effects and gimmicks
  • WebRTC, because what if we connect clients via ICE for cooperation or extending functionality on other devices - like come on, how hard can RTC be?
  • WebSockets, which means all the networking and protocol 101, ideally with some idea how to de-/serialize from/to binary or un-/compress data for better transfer optimization
  • UI and everything "normal" front-end development, including rad features, like WebComponents, all the new JS standards every year, exciting new technologies for better code (pug, SCSS, PostCSS, TypeScript,...), build tools (Parcel, WebPack, Rollup,...), documentation (JSDoc, Markdown, etc.)
  • UX, because the dedicated UX company costs money and only delivers confusing, contradicting statements all the time
  • etc.

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?