The plight of the Front-End Web Developer today

Hello Kiddies,
Commodore 64 back agian to bring you an update from Tech land. While this article is titled towards front-end web devs, it might also apply to all web devs just the same. It’s very unfortunate that I must regress to using the infamous cliche’: in this market, there are challenges.

Now, the nitty gritty.

Holy %^it things are moving fast. We’ve got DHTML, Javascript and CSS already throwing us curveballs on a daily basis.
As if things werent moving fast enough, we have the advent of Google Chrome, Safari for PC (wtf?) and the resurrection in popularity of Opera. Lest we forget all the other OS’es running Konqueror and other lesser known browsers.

It’s sheerly mind-boggling the amount of keeping-up a front end dev must do. My belief is that tabular information and the basic premise behind query languages will always stay the same as long as the data stays 2 dimensional. However the demands on today’s user interfaces grow every day some schmuck makes a widget with a slider that moves ever so more fluidly than its predecessor.

Enter AJAX – Asynchronous Javascript And XML – This was the next stepping stone for many interactive user experiences which relied on the native, built in browser libraries and started to finally move us away from the annoying Flash platform and it’s keyframe-style programming model, and into a new era of highly visual programming with limitless animation possibilities. So, we spent time learning that. Greaaaat.

Then Adobe bought Macromedia. How annoying. But still, Flash has always been Flash.
But not anymore… now it’s called FLEX, and like AJAX it also abandons the concept of keyframes in favor of object oriented animation and programming. But once again, its something new to learn.
If it’s not a browser, its a new OS. If its’s not a new OS, it’s a new version of HTML or CSS ala W3C. If it’s none of those things then it’s a new language/platform altogether.

The art of keeping up with the plethora of versions and platforms and languages (OH MY!) is truly an artful balancing act. Something of a circus I would say. I’ve played Civilization type games where the team who upgrades faster wins. This is totally the case for front-end devs. Because the expectations of the end user are so directly tied to front end design, it becomes almost impossible to achieve that ‘WOW’ factor that used to happen in a simple tween of a vector back in the day. Simply put, people have probably seen it all, or at least feel that way. Now people expect slick sliders and even checkboxes that fade on and off. On the more advanced side people are now expecting that same drag and drop desktop functionality in websites and reporting features ala Crystal Reports, but REAL TIME.

I always saw this coming – the day web browsing and data perusing can ultimately shed it’s refresh button forever. Advances in OS interfaces (ala OSX) have given people more of a feeling for what they’re touching with their mouse. People today feel somehow more connected to the website they are viewing. No longer are people just hapless viewers. Upon entrance to a website (onLoad), users are already drawn into the experience with a multitude of switches and buttons and ads being flown at them in what seems to be 3d.

This burder is being taken on by the front end web dev today. In today’s market companies are looking for all around guys, like myself, who can dive into a simple SQL statement as quickly as formatting a complex wireframe based on CSS principles, and just as quickly repair a content [div] that has broken out of its bounds for some strange reason, and only in one browser and not the other.