Dear Friend,
If you happen to be working as a developer and be given the title of “Front-end Developer” or “Back-end Developer”, you my friend are one of the lucky ones that got to work with a team large enough to have the resources to allocate this titles with a specific task and nothing else.
Front-end Developers are typically programmers that are working away with CSS, JavaScript and possibly some HTML. You might also work closely with a designer that is helping you by creating mockups that you are going to implement with these tools.
Back-end Developers are more focused on what is going on behind the scenes and typically get access to the main stakeholders. They have the keys to the kingdom, one wrong command and an entire cluster of databases can be erased.
Both jobs are stressful and require a different skill set and I’m not saying one is more important than the other but what I am saying is that they both have to be completed at the end of the day if you are going to be creating any piece of Software that will be delivered to a web browser.
Over the last couple of years, the difference between this two types of developers has been blurring for example when you first took a look at Gmail back in 2010 you weren’t sure exactly what you were looking at.
It was a mail provider but yet it required JavaScript to run, this is where the lines start to blur from the front-end to the back-end.
Gmail was not 100 lines of JavaScript code that would just hide/show messages but instead, it was an entire system that was pulling and pushing data in real time. From delivering ads from the AdWords network to scanning all of your messages that were incoming.
With this nice functionality comes complexities that front-end developers were NOT ready to take on and this is where libraries and frameworks really come into play.
Libraries and frameworks are great because they give you the ability to achieve more in less time. You can leverage the time of others to create something that would of have taken you years to complete on your own.
How is this done? Simply put as an “Abstraction” this is nothing new in the world of Software but it is “new” in the world of the web.
If you remember back in the day we had Swing and all of the abstractions you could carry with your executable.
What Swing? Java? You know Java… Right?
Here is where we start straying away from the title Web Developer, the title is lovely and it might make you feel warm and fuzzy inside but in reality are you building websites or are you creating Software?
Don’t get me wrong if you are designing and bringing to reality a theme as a Web Developer all the power to you and probably this is not the post for you, but if you are wanting to create Software the title of Web Developer might just be the mechanism the company that decided to hire you is using to pay you less than what you are REALLY worth. That’s a story for another day.
You see now a day’s with all the tools that are available to you as a developer the power to create has never been easier. You have the ability to tap into the cloud, artificial intelligence, use open source software and create something of value in record speed.
The tooling is vast Unity, AWS, Docker, JavaScript, Watson, Node, NoSQL, Beanstalk, and the list goes on and on.
Who wins Front-end Developer VS Back-end Developer? Neither!
The Full-Stack Developer that can leverage all the tools and compile and ship the fastest is the one that wins.
You can learn to become a Full-Stack Developer with this FREE webinar that I put together for you.
REGISTER FOR THE WEBINAR
Talk soon,
Rick H.
I always had a passion for the field of STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) and I knew I wanted to do something to make a difference in the world. I just didn’t know where to start. I was an immigrant in a new country, grew up in a tough environment, and wasn’t sure how… Read More
