What are the skills required for web development?

Ashish khuraishy November 12, 2018

You want to be a web developer? Here’s what I know about being a professional front-end developer.

First off, you need to know that a web developer is not a web designer. So, no, Photoshop is not required for you to be a web developer. Developers write code, designers design.

Furthermore, in 2017 there are preferred alternatives to Photoshop if you’re a web designer.

Second, all you really need to focus on is JavaScript. Everything else is a branch of JavaScript that you will figure out through learning JavaScript. Except CSS, of course, but there’s no CSS issue that can’t be fixed in a few moments or with quick advice from another developer, so thorough CSS knowledge isn’t as crucial.

HTML is so damn simple, you don’t have to study it. It is not a logical programming language. Write a little bit of HTML and then you know HTML, and you’ll learn more about it through JavaScript and my favorite DOM learning tool, console.log({ someElement }).

Next, jQuery has no place in modern web development. jQuery promotes no good programming patterns and has been disowned by most credible developers in 2016–2017.

How could a tool that was so extremely popular only three years ago be so obsolete now? Well, the web moves fast, friends. In 2017, going into 2018, more than ever are we building web software, not just websites. jQuery made things simple when simple was an acceptable school of thought, as projects did not require serious architecture, performance consideration, and care.

Also, you need to learn to use Git, not FTP. Git is for code collaboration, versioning, and maintenance. FTP is for uploading static files to GoDaddy.

One answer suggested media queries as a “must learn”, almost as to suggest that they are a separate entity than CSS, itself. This is incorrect. Media queries are a part of CSS, and they are not difficult enough to consider a school of their own.

Bootstrap? NO. You learn CSS, not some abstraction. How are you ever going to fare in a project that doesn’t use Bootstrap if all you know is how to stuff classes and rely on pre-fab Bootstrap styles? When you work for a company that has a brand to maintain, what value will you bring by being able to <link/> to Bootstrap and build something that looks like every other beginner website out there?

You’ve gotta be able to look at an image of a design and make it happen without Bootstrap.

And “things are easier on the front end”? On the client, we have to limit our dependency usage to keep load times down and performance up. We literally have to compile JavaScript with Node to JavaScript, utilizing a very daunting tool-chain.

We have to use advanced optimization techniques to make sure that users of our UIs have a seamless experience, no matter what device they are on or how fast their connection is.

We have to manipulate data just like the server does, just with less heavy lifting.

We have to be the ones to handle errors caused by the server and let the users know that somebody made a mistake. We are the face of the application. If we fuck up, everybody see it, money is lost, and suits get angry. Non-technical users and management don’t easily understand more than what they see. They see an error in the UI, or they see the UI break, and they’re ringing the UI guys’ necks.

They don’t see the back-end break. They see the UI break.

One answer suggested that we do “bug testing.” But bug testing is not a thing.

As developers, we fix bugs, yes, but we don’t do “bug testing.” We have unit tests, to test small parts of our code to make sure it works correctly after every change to our codebase. We have integration tests to make sure that our applications work as expected in a simulated user environment. We have a few other kinds of testing, but bug testing is quite a broad and, frankly, incorrect term for them.

Nonetheless, testing is something you will learn in your JavaScript journey.

A front-end framework will help you write better, cleaner, more structured code, and it is pretty essential to getting a high paying job, but underneath that framework it is just JavaScript, so, again, JavaScript proficiency is a must.

And with this one last dying breath, allow me to take a shit on suggestions for WordPress as a required skill for web development:

WordPress is a content management system. (CMS) A CMS is a system for managing content. Installing WordPress, applying some themes and plugins, and adding pages with widgets and images is not what web development is.

In fact, WordPress has as much to do with web development as Facebook does. (But nobody suggests Facebook as a requirement?) Tools are built by developers and used by “customers”. You can develop addons for WordPress, just as you can write custom apps for Facebook. Yet, neither of these tools is related to web development in any other way than that they require developers to build and maintain.