What Is a Front End Developer and How to Become One?

When you are reading this article, front-end developer has become a common job title in this software development industry. And there are a bunch of blogs about the very topic “what is a front-end developer”.

However, if you are new to the industry and want to learn more about this job, then this article is for you. In this blog, we’ll cover these 4 questions:

• What does a front-end developer do?
• What skills do they need to perform this job?
• Where could a beginner learn to become a skilled front-end developer?
• What kind of tools does a front-end developer need?

What Is a Front-End Developer and What Does a Front-End Developer Do?

1. Produce HTML, CSS, JS

This is the most important task of a front-end developer whether you are a junior or an experienced engineer.

It is worth knowing that everything a user lands eyes on in a browser is a mix of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. So, practically, a front-end developer will need to use those web technologies and some other ones to build websites and applications. These products will run on the open web platform or perform as compilation input for non-web platform environments.

As a result, users can see and interact with your product directly through content, buttons, images, navigation, and internal links built by those HTML, CSS, and JS lines of code.

2. Ensure the product is easy to use

While creating interactions, a front-end developer has to work with the product’s UI and UX.

The idea here is to serve a perfect visit to every user who comes to the web. You, as a front-end developer need to work with designers and back-end programmers to make the UI as simple and effective as possible.

Meanwhile, when it comes to UX, a front-end developer’s mission is to improve or enhance the usability, accessibility, and interaction between users and products.

• Besides those two most important tasks, you must:
• Make sure the site appears correctly in different browsers, OS, and devices.
• Implement design for mobile sites.
• Maintain software workflow management.
• Look at SEO best practices.
• Test the site for usability and fix any bugs.

Recommended reading: How Much Does Google Pay Their Software Engineers?

What Skills Do They Need?

1. HTML

HTML is the thing that builds up a website’s structure and content. That’s why every front-end developer needs to be familiar with this language. HTML elements can annotate headers, footers, the display of text, media and images, etc.

Many programmers underestimate the importance of HTML. But little do they know that it takes great skills and practices to deliver lean and clean HTML.

It’s essential to know how to combine all elements correctly and effectively. As a front-end developer, you must have good knowledge of common HTML elements such as default layout rules, styling, HTML semantic,s and contextual usage.

Recommended reading: Top 10 Front End Frameworks for Modern Web Development

2. CSS

CSS is broken into modules and comprises the code for every graphic element—from backgrounds to font—that make up the look and feel of a website.

To answer the question “what is a front-end developer” and master CSS, one must understand fundamental concepts of CSS like cascading, specificity rules, selectors, inheritance, box model, and stacking context.

After getting to know all the basics, it’s time to have some ideas about OOCSS (object-oriented CSS) or start practicing some points from CSS guidelines.

On top of that, experienced front-end developers must have some tips and tricks of their own. For example, they must know all the tricks to vertically align content while Flexbox is not yet mainstream. They must also know when to use pseudo-elements, CSS shape tricks, icon fonts, sprite sheets, etc. to achieve the UI designs with the best performance and compatibility results.

And finally, an up-to-date front-end developer should be able to use a CSS preprocessor to enhance maintainability and productivity.

3. JavaScript

Thanks to its huge resources, JavaScript is the core of a front-end development process. This one is the first client-side language and the most ubiquitous front-end script on the web.

At any level, there are three key features of JavaScript that are crucial to your comprehension of the language; they are prototype chain, closures, and ‘this’ keyword. Other main features of the language such as dynamic typing, literal, variable, and function hoisting… should be understood as well.

At the time you want to know more about JavaScript, let’s learn JS idioms, patterns, modules, and maybe an MV* framework all along.

4. Git

With Git, we can keep track of changes. Besides, GitHub gives people the ability to submit the issues that clients have with the product and they can also request a new feature. Furthermore, your code will be better and your skills will be improved due to the fact that we can revise our work and improve it once there’s a bug.

In general, a front-end developer must be comfortable when working with feature branches, rebasing their work on the work of others, squashing commits using interactive rebase, and doing work in small units that are unlikely to cause conflicts whenever possible.

Recommended reading: Web Developer Salaries in Vietnam 2022

5. UI skills set

As mentioned above, a front-end developer must understand how a website’s UX/UI works so that they can improve or enhance the product.

That said, you should have an understanding of typography, UI, and animation concepts and can speak UI jargon fluently with your UX/UI designer fellows. (i.e: hamburger button, hero banner, the fold…)

What’s more? To get assets for your UI development as well as extract parameters (opacity, gradient, colors…) you must know how to use Adobe Photoshop or Sketch.

Besides all the above most important skills, learning how to use some query languages such as RESTful or GraphQL is also a must for every front-end developer.

FURTHER READING:

1. UI vs UX Design: Definition and Why This Comparison Should Not Exist?

2. 14 Main UI UX Design Terms

3. Top 7 Essential UI Design Principles for Newbies

4. 3 Essential UI Mistakes That You Should Avoid

Best Resources to Learn Front-End Development

1. HTML

• HTML5 Doctor: Reliable reference to HTML5 elements’ usage, especially in a semantic way.
• HTML basic tutorial: Basic HTML tutorials

2. CSS

• CSS Tutorials from webplatform.org
• OOCSS: Object-Oriented CSS methodology by Nicole Sullivan
• CSS Guidelines by CSS Wizardry – Harry Robert
• CSS Tricks: Who does CSS and hasn’t visited this site before?

3. JavaScript

• Eloquent JavaScript: Very good book for JS newbies, and it’s free.
• JavaScript Enlightenment: Another good book for newbies.
• Idiomatic JavaScript: Sometimes you read others’ JS code and can’t get it. Those “cyphers” may be decoded here.
• TodoMVC: A go-to site for MVC frameworks evaluation and comparison
• Writing Modular JS: More details on modern JS modules
• Understanding ES6: Learn ECMAScript 6 with Nicholas C. Zakas

4. UX/UI

• About Face: The Essentials of Interaction Design
• Design for Hackers: Reverse Engineering Beauty
• Design for Non-Designers
• Designing Interfaces
• Designing Web Interfaces: Principles and Patterns for Rich Interactions
• Don’t Make Me Think, Revisited: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability

FURTHER READING:

1. UX Design Process: What You Need To Know?

2. What Does a UX Designer Do to Make the Best Product?

3. UX Design Careers: What You Need to Focus On?

Helpful Tools for Front-End Developer

Just as other workers, we all need tools to make our processes go smoothly and effectively. And just like learning resources, Designveloper will show you the tool to improve your productivity for each key skill.

1. HTML

HTML Templates/Boilerplates/Starter Kits:

• dCodes
• Email-Boilerplate
• HTML5 Boilerplate
• HTML5 Bones
• Mobile boilerplate

HTML Polyfill:

• html5shiv

Transpiling:

• Pug
• Markdown

References:

• Element attributes
• Elements
• HTML Arrows
• HTML Entity Lookup
• htmlreference.io
• HEAD – A free guide to elements

Linting/Hinting:

• HTMLHint
• html-inspector

Optimizer:

• HTML Minifier

Online Creation/Generation/Experimentation Tools:

• tablesgenerator.com

Authoring Conventions:

• HTML Code Guide
• Principles of Writing Consistent, Idiomatic HTML

Workflow:

• Emmet

HTML Outliner:

• HTML 5 Outliner

2. CSS

CSS Utilities:

• Basscss
• Skeleton
• Shed
• Tailwind CSS
• Tachyons

CSS Frameworks (utilities + UI):

• Base
• Bulma
• Bootstrap 4
• Concise
• Foundation
• Material Design Lite (MDL)
• Metro UI
• Mini.css
• Mobi.css
• Picnic
• Pure.css
• Semantic UI
• Shoelace
• Spectre.css

Mobile Only CSS Frameworks:

• Ratchet

CSS Reset:

• Eric Meyer’s “Reset CSS” 2.0
• Normalize
• sanitize.css

Transpiling:

• pleeease.io
• PostCSS & cssnext
• rework & myth

References:

• CSS Cursors
• css3test.com
• css3clickchart.com
• cssreference.io
• CSS Indexes – A listing of every term defined by CSS specs
• css4-selectors.com
• css4 Rocks
• CSS TRIGGERS…A GAME OF LAYOUT, PAINT, AND COMPOSITE
• CSS Tricks Almanac
• cssvalues.com
• MDN CSS Reference
• CSS Cheat Sheet

Linting/Hinting:

• CSS Lint
• stylelint

Code Formatter/Beautifier:

• CSScomb
• CSSfmt

Optimizer:

• clear-css
• cssnano
• CSSO
• purgecss

Online Creation/Generation/Experimentation Tools:

• CSS Arrow Please
• CSS Matic
• Enjoy CSS
• Flexbox Playground
• flexplorer
• patternify.com
• patternizer.com
• Ultimate CSS Gradient Generator

SC5 STYLE GUIDE GENERATOR

• styleguide-generators
• Catalog

3. JavaScript

JS Utilities:

• accounting.js
• async
• axios
• chance
• date-fns
• format.js
• immutable
• is.js
• lodash
• You-Dont-Need-Lodash-Underscore
• Luxon
• Math.js
• Moment.js
• Numeral.js
• Ramda
• RxJS
• string.js
• voca
• wait
• xregexp.com

Transforming JavaScript Objects Tool:

• transform-www

Transpiling / Type Checking (ES to ES):

• Babel
• TypeScript
• Flow

Code-analysis Engine:

• Tern

Linting/Hinting & Style Linter:

• Eslint

Unit Testing:

• AVA
• Jasmine
• Mocha
• Tape

Testing Assertions for Unit Testing:

• Chai
• expect.js
• should.js

Test Spies, Stubs, and Mocks for Unit Testing:

• sinon.js
• Kakapo.js

Code Formater/Beautifier:

• esformatter
• js-beautify
• jsfmt
• prettier

Performance Testing:

• benchmark.js
• jsperf.com

Visualization, Static Analysis, Complexity, Coverage Tools:

• Esprima
• Istanbul

Optimizer:

• Closure Compiler
• UglifyJS 2
• optimize-js
• Prepack

Obfuscate:

• Javascript Obfuscator [free to $]
• JScrambler [$]

Sharable/Runnable Code Editors:

• CodeSandbox [free to $]
• Online Regular Expression Editors/Visual Tools:
• debuggex
• regex101
• regexper
• RegExr
• extendsclass
• regextester

Authoring Convention Tools:

• Airbnb’s ESLint config, following our style guide
• Standard – ESLint Shareable Config

Phew, so this is the end, we hope that you enjoyed this piece of writing. But aren’t you interested in this title? Here’s good news for you! Designveloper is looking for front-end developers, so let’s join us now to figure out what is a front-end developer yourself. Click here to find out more!

And don’t forget to follow our Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

FURTHER READING:

1. Top 7 Best Resources to Learn React JS for Free

2. 12 Free HTML5 Resources To Learn for Newbies

3. How to Become a Full Stack Developer? Does It Suit You?