Josh Collinsworth

The quiet, pervasive devaluation of frontend

I feel like I’m seeing a widespread diminishment of the practice of frontend. Nearly everywhere I look, I notice its importance minimized, and its challenges trivialized.

This article is incredibly vindicating. For the entirety of my time in web development I have heard the claim that HTML and CSS are too simple and beneath the threshold of what qualifies as true “development,” but this attitude has proved to be a detriment to efficient styling, accessibility, and structure for the foundational elements of what makes a webpage. Websites now appear like a chaotic mess of divs with no structure or semantic sensibilities, and styling that lacks the proper separation of concerns that leads to efficient DRY methodologies. The diminishment of front-end development seems to cause excessive framework cycling and decent tooling for builds, leading to complicated setups for even the simplest of pages.

I have always had an admiration for the work that back-end developers do on a site. Their hard work in carefully tailoring APIs and databases for the most efficient calls has always impressed me. I didn’t realize how much I belittled my own experience and skills because of the outward pressure I experienced throughout my formative years along with my own sense of insecurity. I think this snobbery towards front-end development should change. Design is an essential step and front-end development requires a skill that others lack and we should all stop pretending.