The Pros & Cons of Front End Development

Mercurial thoughts on the discipline of front end development

I’ve been a front end developer for ten years. I’ve been thinking about front end development as a discipline a lot lately. As I grow in my career and continue to reflect on our place within technology, my thoughts tend to drift. They drift away from the day-to-day work of learning new frameworks, exploring new tools, or solving complex problems in novel ways.

Rather than thinking about the “what” of our work, I’ve been thinking about how and why we do it. Things like:

• How does “front end” fit into the industry?
• How will that change over time?
• Where do we want it to go?
• What kind of things do we want to be doing in five, or ten years?
• What are the best ways we can use the rapidly shifting sands of the technical landscape to our advantage?
• How do we negotiate a world that is sprinting towards immersive technological experiences like augmented reality, virtual reality and blurring the old lines between “back” and “front” ends?

There’s no right or wrong answers to these questions…from what I can tell, there’s often two opposing answers that both seem to make sense. Here’s my attempt to make sense of it…

The Internet Got Shrinkwrapped

The notion of doing the heavy-lifting of building the internet is largely gone for most people who create things on the internet. Everything is a product.

Like me, for example, writing this blog post. I’m not writing every <img /> tag or headline in semantic HTML like the old days. I have Medium to do it for me (yay!). As products take the “tech” out of the internet, things become easier to use and quicken methods of production. Some of that “productization” has bled into front end development.

+ P R O
The increasingly complexity is a net-gain for our discipline. The web has finally seemed to reach a point of reasonable standardization. Browsers no longer fight over the specs, and seem to embrace new things like CSS grid at a faster and more uniform pace. This makes trying new things easier, even if the…