What You Need to Know to be a Front End Developer in 2018

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Trends in Front End Development are always changing — what worked yesterday may not work today. This can make being a Front End Developer pretty challenging!

But what’s most challenging about being a Front End Developer is also what’s most exciting – you’re always learning new technologies.

What is a Front End Developer, and how do they fit into the ecosystem of web development?

There are generally two parts to any web application. The front end, or client side, of the web app is everything you see and interact with in the browser as a user of the application.

Then there’s the back end, or server-side of the web application, where the application’s data is saved, updated, manipulated, and sent back to the client side.

Think of your favorite video site. When you click on that video of waterskiing puppies, the video is retrieved from a database and served to you by a server. That’s the back end. The front end displays it for you in the browser, allows you to interact with the video by providing buttons to blow up the video to full screen, pause, rewind, or share with your grandma.

As a web developer, you’ll likely need to have some knowledge of how the front and back ends of an application interact with each other. However, many companies split these roles into two careers – a Front End Developer and a Back End Developer.

Back End Developers use languages like Java, Python, Ruby and PHP to build the behind-the-scenes functionality of a website, such as storing and retrieving user data or securely accepting and storing credit card numbers.

A Front End Developer is a generic term for someone who builds the user-facing parts of websites and applications using HTML, CSS and JavaScript.

Nearly every business uses a website or application to communicate to its customers. The world needs the skills of a Front End Developer.

If you search for Front End jobs you’ll find that there are many additional keywords that are thrown into the mix, like Mobile, UX, UI, Web Developer, Full Stack – all of those keywords add additional specificity to what is an assumed base knowledge of how websites and applications are built.

In this video, I’m talking about what you need to know to be a more general, but still awesome Front End Developer.

Technologies you’ll need to learn
• HTML
• CSS
• JavaScript

Tools
• Text Editor – Visual Studio Code, Sublime Text 3, Atom
• Browser Developer Tools – Chrome Dev Tools, Firefox dev tools
• Version Control – Git & GitHub

Other Important Technologies
• Sass / CSS Preprocessing
• JavaScript Libraries: jQuery, React
• JS Frameworks: Angular, Vue.js
• Front End Framework: Bootstrap
• Command Line, CLI
• Module Loading/Bundling Tools: webpack, Rollup, Browserify
• WordPress
• Image Editor – Photoshop$, Sketch$
• Wireframing Tools – Balsamiq$, Figma$

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