Tagged “frontend”
It's 2023, here is why your web design sucks (by Heather Buchel)
Heather explores why we no longer have “web designers”.
It's been belittled and othered away. It's why we've split that web design role into two; now you're either a UX designer and you can sit at that table over there or you're a front-end developer and you can sit at the table with the people that build websites.
SaaS startups will have to care about productivity again, by DHH
Getting to profitability is no longer a distant, post-IPO nice-to-have, but a short-term necessity for survival. But how to do that without cutting off the legs of the product team? By using better tools and techniques, that's how.
DHH of 37 Signals and Basecamp offers three pieces of advice for productivity and profitability.
1: Unless market conditions demand otherwise, delay native app development for as long as possible.
2: Hire full-stack developers, and don't let them split the frontend and backend into separate jurisdictions.
3: Hire designers who work natively with the web.
A front-end developer’s job
Recently I’ve been reflecting on what we front-end developers do in the modern era. Working on a design system in 2022, I feel now more than ever that my job represents a convergence of a range of interesting disciplines, goals, skills and experiences. These include UX knowledge and usability testing, a degree of design savvy, systems and atomic thinking, accessibility knowledge and strong skills with the core web standards. That’s my understanding of front-end development.
Yet not long ago a colleague recalled the time a teammate teased him that front-end developers “put the froth on the cappuccino”. While this gave us all a laugh, I imagine it also reflects one common misunderstanding and undervaluing of our role.
Meanwhile there’s another image of front-end development that’s very engineering rather than user experience oriented. This focuses on JavaScript and tooling and arose in the era of NPM and JavaScript frameworks. In this definition, front-end developers spend their time wrangling JavaScript, configuring build tools and manipulating API data.
I’m conscious of the great divide and while my career has straddled that divide, I’ll freely admit that at heart I’m a front of the front-ender.
Resources for learning front-end web development
A designer colleague recently asked me what course or resources I would recommend for learning front-end web development. She mentioned React at the beginning but I suggested that it’d be better to start by learning HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. As for React: it’s a subset or offshoot of JavaScript so it makes sense to understand vanilla JS first.
For future reference, here are my tips.
Design Engineering, on the Clearleft Podcast
Loved this short listen from Clearleft, on a subject close to my heart! New job titles can feel a bit “emperor’s new clothes” but with Design Engineering I think Clearleft, GitHub et al. might be onto something. It was fascinating hearing people from both design and engineering backgrounds give their perspectives, and how ultimately they’re addressing the same thing—the need to “finesse the overlaps/gaps” between design and the realisation of that design in engineering, especially in light of the complexities of the modern front-end.
Front-of-the-front-end and back-of-the-front-end web development (by Brad Frost)
The Great Divide between so-called front-end developers is real! Here, Brad Frost proposes some modern role definitions.
A front-of-the-front-end developer is a web developer who specializes in writing HTML, CSS, and presentational JavaScript code.
A back-of-the-front-end developer is a web developer who specializes in writing JavaScript code necessary to make a web application function properly.
Daniel Post shared a really cool performance-optimisation trick for Eleventy on Twitter the other day. When statically generating your site you can loop through your pages and, for each, use PurgeCSS to find the required CSS, then inline that into the <head>. This way, each page contains only the CSS it needs and no more!
I’ve just installed this on my personal site. I was already inlining my CSS into the <head> but the promise of only including the minimum CSS that each specific page needs was too good to resist.
Turned out it was a breeze to get working, a nice introduction to Eleventy transforms, and so far it’s working great!
I have to reluctanctly agree on this one. I’ve interviewed quite a few candidates for “front-end developer” (or similarly named) positions over recent years and the recurring pattern is that they are strong on JavaScript (though not necessarily the right time to use it) and weak on HTML, CSS and the “bigger picture”.
🧵 It's time for our industry to realize the title "frontend developer" is obsolete. The vast majority of these profiles are actually "JS engineers", and they're usually quite good at it, but they're not as good at all the other things contributing to great frontend experiences.
— Benjamin De Cock (@bdc) April 13, 2020
Stuffing the front end
Here’s Bridget Stewart, a developer from Ohio, with some thoroughly enjoyable “curmudgeonly” thoughts on why your website doesn’t necessarily need a Javascript framework.
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