Comments on: What Does a Front-End Developer Do?

By: What Does a Front-End Developer Do? « Naga Nstudios

What Does a Front-End Developer Do? « Naga Nstudios — Wed, 14 Apr 2010 16:33:13 +0000

[...] http://www.amuhlou.com/2010/01/20/what-does-a-front-end-developer-do/ Possibly related posts: (automatically generated)Using crowd?driving recognize mechanics for an [...]

By: Naga - Graphic / Web designer

Naga - Graphic / Web designer — Wed, 14 Apr 2010 16:14:14 +0000

Now I can call myself a Front-end developer too :)

By: Larry A.

Larry A. — Sat, 23 Jan 2010 01:01:00 +0000

I’d say you have roughly equal chance at ‘breaking something’ on both sides. Take it slow and you’ll get it.

By: amuhlou

amuhlou — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 12:05:42 +0000

well, “she works with websites” works too hehe

By: dad

dad — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 11:02:31 +0000

thanks for the shout out. now i can say more than “she works with websites”!

love
dad

By: amuhlou

amuhlou — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 01:36:46 +0000

Crossing over is definitely something I’d like to eventually be able to do well. I’m still at the “worried I’ll break something” stage for the most part.

By: Larry A.

Larry A. — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 01:28:27 +0000

My experience has led me to play both sides of the line, front and back-end (client vs. server side coding). I’ve found that understanding what each can do has given me wisdom to know that doing something on either end won’t break the other end.

I’ve seen that Website Designers or Graphic Designers can do a lot of the Front-End work: producing creative designs for a website and turning it into CSS goodness; reworking an existing site to look a lot better than it currently is. When you begin to talk JavaScript then you’re more likely to be doing the back-end coding too I would think (coding vs. design).

By: Lar Van Der Jagt

Lar Van Der Jagt — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 00:34:29 +0000

I consider myself a ‘full-stack’ developer, comfortable on both sides of the line. The more aware you are of the capabilities on each side the easier it is to integrate them.

For a concrete example, I use Ruby (a server side scripting language) to be more effective in the front-end. It lets me build up reusable design patterns/modules that get filled in with content from server side data. When I need to make a change in how one of those modules is displayed, I change it in one place & the change appears everywhere else in the site.

Additionally there are many frameworks available now which take a bunch of chunks of HTML and some dynamic data and mash them together to generate a static site. They let you do things like site-wide layouts or navigation without a heavyweight application framework.