EXACTLY WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW TO BECOME A FRONT END DEVELOPER IN 2021

Have you ever looked at your favorite website and wondered why it was laid out the way it is, the way the buttons acted when you clicked them, or any other part of the site and thought, “I wonder how complicated that is?” or, “I wish I could do that”? Well, all of those visible site features are built through front end development (sometimes also called “front end web development”) — and the people behind them have a name: front end developers.

Front end developers are some of the most in-demand roles, and for good reason — we wouldn’t get to enjoy internet black holes without them. In a second, we’ll break down all the skills front end developers use and need, but here is a quick front end development definition:

What is Front End Development?

While web design is the way a website looks, front end development is how that design actually gets implemented on the web.

So, What Is a Front End Developer?

A front end web developer is the person who implements web designs through coding languages like HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Though it’s not as common anymore, front end developers are/were sometimes called “client-side developers” to distinguish them from back end developers who program what goes on behind the scenes (like databases). If you head to any site, you can see the work of a front end developer everywhere — in the navigation, layouts including this article page, even the way that a site looks different from your phone (thanks to mobile-first or responsive design). Want more? You can read our guide on everything it takes to start a web developer career here.

Now that we’ve got that out of the way, this article will break down some of the key skills front end web developers use on the job.

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What Skills do Front End Web Developers Use?

Front end web developers use three primary coding languages to code the website and web app designs created by web designers:

HTML
CSS
JavaScript

The code they write runs inside the user’s browser (as opposed to a back end developer, whose code runs on the web server). Think of it a little like this: the back end developer is like the engineer who designs and creates the systems that make a city work (electricity, water and sewer, zoning, etc.), while the front end developer is the one who lays out the streets and makes sure everything is connected properly so people can live their lives (a simplified analogy, but you get the rough idea). A front end web developer is also in charge of making sure that there are no errors or bugs on the front end, as well as making sure that the design appears as it’s supposed to across various platforms and browsers.

I’ve combed through dozens of front end web developer job listings to see which skills are the most in-demand right now. These are the things that real employers are looking for in job applicants today (and will still be looking for in the near future). Master these things and you’re certain to land an awesome front end dev job!

Skillcrush’s Break Into Tech program is an online course where you’ll get a solid foundation en route to landing the developer job you’re after. If you enroll in the Front End Developer Fast Track, you’ll start with skills like HTML and CSS, then move on to more advanced skills, like responsive web development, Git, and JavaScript.

HTML & CSS

HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language) and CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) are the most basic building blocks of web coding. Without these two things, you can’t create a website design, and all you’ll end up with is unformatted plain text on the screen. You can’t even add images to a page without HTML!

Before you get started on any web development career path, you’ll have to master coding with HTML and CSS. The good news is that getting a solid working knowledge of either of these can be done in just a few weeks.

The best part: HTML and CSS knowledge alone will let you build basic websites.

JavaScript

JavaScript lets you add a ton more functionality to your websites, and you can create a lot of basic web applications using nothing more than HTML, CSS, and JavaScript (JS for short). On the most basic level, JS is used to create and control things like maps that update in real time, interactive films, and online games. Sites like Pinterest use JavaScript heavily to make their user interface easy to use (the fact that the page doesn’t reload whenever you pin something is thanks to JavaScript!).

It’s also the most popular programming language in the world, so regardless of your dev career plans, it’s a super valuable thing to learn.

Read more about JavaScript here: Tech 101: What is JavaScript?

jQuery

jQuery is a JavaScript library: a collection of plugins and extensions that makes developing with JavaScript faster and easier. Rather than having to code everything from scratch, jQuery lets a front end web developer add ready-made elements to projects, then customize as necessary (one reason why knowing JavaScript is so important). You can use jQuery for things like countdown timers, search form autocomplete, and even automatically-rearranging and resizing grid layouts.

JavaScript Frameworks

JS frameworks (including AngularJS, Backbone, Ember, and ReactJS) give a ready-made structure to your JavaScript code. There are different types of JavaScript frameworks for different needs, though the four mentioned are the most popular in actual job listings. These frameworks really speed up development by giving you a jumpstart, and can be used with libraries like jQuery to minimize how much from-scratch coding you have to do.

Front End Frameworks

CSS and front end frameworks (the most popular front end framework is Bootstrap) do for CSS what JS Frameworks do for JavaScript: they give you a jumping-off point for faster coding. Since so much CSS starts with exactly the same elements from project to project, a framework that defines all of these for you upfront is super valuable. Most front end developer job listings expect you to be familiar with how these frameworks work and how to use them.

Experience with CSS Preprocessors

Preprocessors are another element that a front end developer can use to speed up CSS coding. A CSS preprocessor adds extra functionality to CSS to keep our CSS scalable and easier to work with. It processes your code before you publish it to your website, and turns it into well-formatted and cross-browser friendly CSS. SASS and LESS are the two most in-demand preprocessors, according to real job listings.

Experience with RESTful Services and APIs

Without getting too technical on this one, REST stands for Representational State Transfer. In basic terms, it’s a lightweight architecture that simplifies network communication on the web, and RESTful services and APIs are those web services that adhere to REST architecture. Read more about REST and RESTful services here.

Let’s say you wanted to write an app that shows you all your social media friends in the order you became friends. You could make calls to Facebook’s RESTful API to read your friends list and return that data. The same thing with Twitter (which also uses RESTful APIs). The general process is the same for any service that uses RESTful APIs, just the data returned will be different.

While it all sounds really complicated and technical, it’s a simple set of guidelines and practices that set expectations so you know how to communicate with a web service. They also make a web service perform better, scale better, work more reliably, and be easier to modify or move.

Credits: https://skillcrush.com/