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…