Last week on ShopTalk, Dave and I spoke with Mandy Michael and Lara Schenck. Mandy had just written the intentionally provocative "Is there any value in people who cannot write JavaScript?" which guided our conversation. Lara is deeply interested in this subject as well, as someone who is a job seeking web worker, but places herself on the spectrum as a non-unicorn.

Part of that discussion was about job titles. If there was a ubiquitously accepted and used job title that meant you were specifically skilled at HTML and CSS, and there was a market for that job title, there probably wouldn't be any problem at all. There isn't though. "Web developer" is too vague. "Front-end developer" maybe used to mean that, but has been largely co-opted by JavaScript.

I tried to illustrate some of the issues I remember, from wrong font sizes to spacing to alignment. There was a lot more issues, but you get the point. To the developer this was fine because he was more concerned about the functionality and JS behind this and visually he believed it was “close enough”. Unfortunately, for this client (and any client IMO) would equally care for the aesthetics. This individual was extremely talented in JS builds and development but visuals and CSS weren’t his strength. On the flip side, I also worked with individuals who are truly amazing CSS developers but aren’t heavily invested in deep JS work.

Over the past years, AdRoll has grown from a humble startup built around a single feature to a global marketing platform with a diverse suite of products. Along with the growth of the company, we have put a lot of work into building a solid infrastructure for user interface development. In this post, we talk about the human aspects of front-end projects that are shared between multiple engineering teams.

Our current front-end infrastructure consists of UI components, a UX pattern library and various JavaScript packages for internationalization (i18n), analytics and A/B testing. We consider all these projects “internally open sourced”. This means we encourage our engineers to use contributions to these projects as a way of sharing their knowledge across team boundaries. Ultimately, we believe

According to various sources, including the Stack Overflow Developer Survey 2017, JavaScript is the most commonly used programming language on Earth and I do love it, I actually tweeted this a while back:

But this article isn’t about how much I love JavaScript, nope, it’s about how much it’s saturating the front end development space and worryingly becoming the be–all and end–all of front end development.

Let’s recap, the three front end technologies are:

• HTML
• CSS
• JavaScript

However, it seems nowadays that most front end developers, and people looking to hire them, are only caring about the big “J”, plus one of the big JavaScript frameworks/libraries, well let’s just say

I’ve only been a full time web developer for the past 5 years. It’s barely enough time to start calling myself a “senior” Software Engineer. In that short period of time the web technology stack has evolved tremendously.

In early 2012 I was finishing up my master’s degree and got a job at my friend’s start up called DigiSpoke, hoping to learn some Java. It was a SaaS product with a complex UI, so I ended up working mostly on the Front End instead.

I quickly realized that building our Front End with just jQuery was error-prone. I saw that people were using Backbone and Angular 1 was an up and coming framework. I tried to encourage our team to adopt Angular, but we decided against it, since “it would take too long to rewrite everything”.

Having worked with C# for at least half my career (and later a Java stack), I initially looked down on JavaScript. From the perspective of a “server-side engineer”, it was always the ugliest part of any codebase - good for enhancing web applications with AJAX calls and other client-side magic, but not for powering core functionality.

Node changed everything, not just from a technical standpoint, but how we work together to reach the customer.

Most of us have worked in software development teams where engineers were exclusively server-side or client-side in focus, or ‘T-shaped’ - with some involvement in both.

Our front-end application at Dawex (a marketplace for monetizing and acquiring data) is a Single-Page App powered with AngularJS. First lines of code were written during summer 2015. Back in time, it totally made sense to choose this framework. We had large experience with it and it fairly matched our needs for the platform. Angular (the new one) was only in alpha version. React started to be popular and used among the front-end community but we didn’t have enough feedback with it. And Vue… well, it didn’t yet make its own way. Who knew it would end up with the big players?

Even though our app is developed with an

Finding an awesome developer requires that you are clear on what you’re looking for. Do you want a full-stack or a front end / back end person? Do you need specific skills like knowledge of AI, blockchain, or big data?

Unless you have a specific reason, don’t hire technology-specific. Instead, hire based on fundamental knowledge.

Over the years, I’ve interviewed hundreds of developers. One of my biggest learnings is that there can be no assumptions. I’ve interviewed people with a Masters in Computer Science who had trouble writing a for-loop that iterated through an array.

So the first rule is to hire people who (preferably) have fundamental knowledge, coding experience, and a willingness to constantly learn new languages and skills.

As most people well know, all programming languages have their faults. Some have more than others. However, JavaScript is especially bad. That’s why you can find so many complaints about JavaScript on the web. One of the most amazing and distressing things about JavaScript is that it can actually fail silently at runtime due to syntactical errors! Another thing is “callback hell” which promises can mitigate but are otherwise not a perfect solution. The most notorious of JavaScript’s faults is probably in its weak typing (not to be confused with dynamic typing) which manifests in the profusion of WATs and WTFs that make JavaScript the butt of so many industry jokes. Here is one of the funniest (from a JavaScript proponent, no less!):

Written by Cody Lindley sponsored by — Frontend Masters

This is a guide that anyone could use to learn about the practice of front-end development. It broadly outlines and discusses the practice of front-end engineering: how to learn it and what tools are used when practicing it in 2017.

It is specifically written with the intention of being a professional resource for potential and currently practicing front-end developers to equip themselves with learning materials and development tools. Secondarily, it can be used by managers, CTOs, instructors, and head hunters to gain insights into the practice of front-end development.

In this post we will be discussing about some of the HTML5 Responsive Frameworks for Web Developers. Developers likes HTML5 because of its better interoperability between browsers and that's why it emerged as an important language for cross platform mobile application development. In this post we will be discussing about some of the HTML5 Responsive Frameworks which will assist developers to build responsive web applications.

Bootstrap is the most popular and powerful HTML, CSS and JavaScript Framework for developing responsive, mobile first applications. Bootstrap is an open-source framework for developing responsive, mobile-first websites.  It is actually a powerful front-end framework, which includes HTML and CSS based design templates for UI components like buttons, drop-downs, tabs, accordion, etc. For more information about Bootstrap, read

This list was last updated January 2017. Dates and locations are subject to change. If you have recommendations for conferences to add to the list, leave them in the comment section below! We’ll be continually adding conferences to the list.

January 19–20, 2017 — Budapest, Hungary (Node)

January 20–21, 2017 — Dornbirn, Austria (React)

January 20–21, 2017 — Prato, Italy (Go)

January 27, 2017 — Linz, Austria (JavaScript)

January 27, 2017 — San Diego, CA (Ember)

January 27, 2017 — New York City, NY (Front-end)

January 27–29, 2017 — Kochi, India (Ruby)

February 2–4, 2017 — Cape Town, South Africa (Ruby)

Feb 2–4, 2017 — Miami, FL (PHP)

Being a front end developer is not an easy task these days. With the rise of new frameworks and libraries every week it’s not that easy to keep up with all the updates. In my opinion front end developers today need to learn how to utilize the amazing data source called “The Internet” to their advantage.

A lot of people ask me if they should go and learn coding in this or that school, my answer is always the same: “Take the time to learn alone, look for internet courses, read blogs, go to meetups and etc..”.
In my opinion people who can’t learn alone will have really hard time getting a good job, and more importantly getting a second job.

If you did some front-end development, you’re probably familiar with Object-Oriented Programming, even if you don’t know it. Many JS libraries are exposing classes, which can be instantiated to describe the desired effect, like this:

const waypoint = new Waypoint({
 element: document.getElementById('thing'),
 handler: () => console.log('You have scrolled to a thing')
})

JavaScript is mostly used in an OO way, but nothing prevents us from using it in a functional way. Let’s see how the two would differ.

But first, a disclaimer: I know FP vs. OOP is a broad, nuanced, and sometimes fuzzy subject. What follows is a slight simplification of a perhaps false dichotomy. Nevertheless, I think that front-end development can benefit greatly from FP influences.

If you did some front-end development, you’re probably familiar with Object-Oriented Programming, even if you don’t know it. Many JS libraries are exposing classes, which can be instantiated to describe the desired effect, like this:

const waypoint = new Waypoint({
 element: document.getElementById('thing'),
 handler: () => console.log('You have scrolled to a thing')
})

JavaScript is mostly used in an OO way, but nothing prevents us from using it in a functional way. Let’s see how the two would differ.

But first, a disclaimer: I know FP vs. OOP is a broad, nuanced, and sometimes fuzzy subject. What follows is a slight simplification of a perhaps false dichotomy. Nevertheless, I think that front-end development can benefit greatly from FP influences.

If you’re a front-end dev like me, you’ll often find yourself making pull requests that have visual changes. I wanted to share something that I’ve started doing at work that has been helpful in getting my pull requests approved.

The idea is simple, but I will add a few tips and tricks to help you take it to the next level!

The basic idea is to add screenshots and screen recordings for any visual changes. They make the job for the reviewers much easier since they can visually see what’s been changed instantly.

I like to show the before and after visual diffs.

Take a screenshot of the before and after, and add it to your PR like so: