Defining frontend development

I've always felt quite perturbed about the terms 'frontend' and 'backend' developer, used to divide groups of developers into teams responsible for different parts of an application.

HTML has existed since 1993 and as a standard since 1996. PHP was originally created in 1994 with Javascript emerging in Netscape Navigator 2 during 1995. It's difficult to say when CSS became the defacto way of telling a browser how to actually render the HTML because it took a number of years before browsers adopted the standards to a reasonable level but it's certainly true that many web developers throughout the following decades would acquire a basic level of skill across all the technologies that were actually required to create a functioning website.

Over time these technologies expanded to include more and more features, leading to people specialising in the areas that they spent most of their time.

Now we're almost in 2018, a quarter of century after HTML first emerged from the swamp and the web has eaten the world. At some point in that time web developers split into two camps, one to work on things that happen in the browser and the other to work on whatever the server needs to do.

That history is where I think we now get unstuck. The perception that a frontend developer should be responsible for all the code that happens to execute in the browser. That may have once been true in the early days of HTML, CSS and Javascript but with more and more functionality being pushed into the browser, this is no longer the case.

In reality there are two types of developer that work with browser technology. One of them typically has a mastery of CSS and HTML and perhaps some basic javascript (jQuery etc).

The second is much more of a grey area. Perhaps they have a very good knowledge of CSS and HTML but have more of a focus on Javascript, perhaps both in the browser with frameworks like React / Angular / etc and an understanding of Redux, and on the server side with node.js.

PHP is still one of the most popular server side scripting languages too. Developers that work with PHP will also have a good knowledge of HTML and at least a basic knowledge of CSS.

For me, the title of Frontend Developer needs to be narrowed down to describe those developers with the deep understanding of HTML and CSS - the skills that are so essential to building a fully responsive, multi-browser web site in 2017. These are the parts of the application that are presented to a browser and are directly responsible for the look and feel of the user interface.

Beyond the UI we need to be looking at developers with knowledge in other areas within the Javascript ecosystem (both client and server side) and beyond, into php or scala. These are our full stack developers with specialist knowledge of the software stack from just below what is presented to the user, down to what happens on the server side.