Comments on: 10 “Nice-To-Have” Skills for Front-End Developers

By: Ash Menon

Ash Menon — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 16:22:04 +0000

I definitely agree with a lot of these items. Being both a designer and a front-end-er myself, it’s scary how common my skillset is. SOME familiarity with ActionScript, occasional WP programming, SOME PHP knowledge. I really have to polish up my skills then :)

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Fri, 28 Aug 2009 17:30:08 +0000

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By: carla

carla — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 09:32:08 +0000

wow I have A LOT to learn. Right now all I know is AS, OOP, a little bit of javascript and mySQL. How many years can you master all of these? Hahahaha…

Thanks for the article!

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Futher Reading: free downloads, killer contract & web fonts | — Sat, 30 May 2009 09:18:11 +0000

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By: Sarah

Sarah — Fri, 15 May 2009 02:23:48 +0000

As a web designer who does some front-end development, I found this post very useful in terms of which languages I need to brush up on and would be nice to add to my resume. I’m no Info Architect, but I think your list was on the money from what I’ve been seeing listed as job requirements for various openings.

By: Darius

Darius — Wed, 13 May 2009 11:45:55 +0000

A “nice” list. :-)

I have a request though: can you please improve the CONTRAST of the text vs. background in your site? Despite your beautiful, minimalistic design, your site will have accessibility issues with those who have poor vision.

Thank you very much, and more power to your blog!

By: Rodrigo

Rodrigo — Tue, 12 May 2009 20:34:10 +0000

I pretty much agree with most of the post but… WordPress themes?!?! WTF!? PHPMyAdmin?! what the hell are you talking about?!

Wordpress theming is very specific, and taking into consideration you should know any server-side programming language (OO or not), specially php (for this particular case), and CSS, then you should be able to, if needed, quickly learn how to theme WP.

As for PHPMyAdmin, be extremely carefull, it shouldn’t even be too emphasized as it could become a serious threat to your server and data.

If you had said mySQL (postgreSQL/SQL in general) I would definitely agree.

By: Impressive Webs

Impressive Webs — Tue, 12 May 2009 16:42:47 +0000

@Rick:

Thanks for your comments. But frankly you’re being a little narrow minded. Much of my post was geared towards “amateurs”. “Rank amateurs” are still “developers”, so I think you’re being a little harsh there — implying that someone is not a developer if he doesn’t know much about OOP and SVN.

And regarding Version Control: I have been in web development for 9 years and have never seen a front-end developer job posting make any mention of Version Control technology.

What you wrote is no different than saying that a back-end coder is not professional if he doesn’t know how to do graphic design!

By: Rick

Rick — Tue, 12 May 2009 08:50:42 +0000

1 & 5 are not “nice to have” skills. If you don’t have these, you’re not a “developer”, you’re a rank amateur.

Most other items listed are about the depth and breath of a front-end developers skill, but using version control and knowing OOP are basic developer skills, like any carpenter should know how to use a hammer and a nail, even if it’s an inexperienced and not particularly talented carpenter.

Especially this sentence is a big red flag: “Generally, in a team environment, front-end developers won’t have to worry too much about all the features of versioning software, since the back-end team members will more than likely have the ability to walk them through any issues that come up.” Sounds like a real healthy team-dynamic, using the back-enders as personal assistants to compensate for the lack of professional skills of the front-enders….

Luckily, there has been a strong movement towards professionalization from the front-end developers themselves the past two years, because on behalf of all back-end developers I can assure you this kind of attitude doesn’t work on a professional team.

By: ian morton

ian morton — Tue, 12 May 2009 07:57:07 +0000

One of the things you may want to learn is to do without phpMyAdmin as it can be a security risk to have this type of software on the web server. It’s great to have such a tool on the development machine; easy to use and pretty comprehensive. I would suggest getting the free copy of Navicat or simlar mySQL editors which can be run from a remote machine through ssh or php tunneling. The purchased versions also have easier backup/restore facilities and documentation support.