“Design is not just what it looks and feels like. Design is how it works” -Steve Jobs
From the last decade, advances and the omnipresence of technology have put digitization at the topmost priority for businesses across the world. Now, it’s no longer a question of whether or not you should bring your business onto the internet, rather how well you can do that to ensure optimal user experience. This momentous truth of today’s businesses has made front-end development a decisive element to the success and failure of their online presence. No wonder the average base salaries of front-end developers, a job that was practically nonexistent just a decade ago, is now around 126% that of more conventional jobs like accounting.
Pretty exciting huh? Especially so if you have an artistic mind with a knack for programming. Indeed, you’d have a hard time finding a better-suited job to channel your passion for creating scalable outputs and achieve the work Nirvana — Ikigai. That being said, if you’re a recent graduate you may not even know what a front-end developer is, and what the job would actually entail? After all, it’s not a conventional job for which our education system could have prepared you. So to answer the primary question-
Who is a Front End Developer?
A front-end developer is a computer programmer whose primary focus is on the side of a website or application where the user interacts with it — the front end.
To dive a little deeper…
A front-end developer creates the visual aspects of a website, the aspects that the users see and interact with. This includes elements like the layout, navigation bar, buttons, forms, etc. A front-end developer does that by using technical assets like HTML, CSS, JavaScript, etc (more on this later.)
Era of Remote Job
“One day offices will be a thing of the past” — Richard Branson
Pandemic or not, the advantages of remote work have already outweighed that of working fully in the offices. The pandemic has only hastened up the conversion, and in some cases, forced people to make deliberate efforts to realize the pros of working remotely. That being said, doing a highly collaborative job like front-end development isn’t always as easy to do from remote locations. From unclear communication to inexplicit availability, there are quite a few problems that can adversely impact the easy flow of the task. This is why when it comes to assessing skills for a front-end development job, the requirements are a bit more complex than that of a regular job; which brings us to the question at hand, i.e. what are the top skills for a remote front end developer to get hired.
The top 5 skills that employers are looking for in their ideal remote front-end developer can be majorly divided into two categories, soft skills — which improve your employability across the spectrum, and hard skills, the skills you need to have to be able to do your job.
Soft Skills
1. Communication:
Your communication skills can either make your work more efficient or unnecessarily increase the overheads, especially so when you’re working remotely. As a front-end developer, you’ll be required to liaise with varied members of your team including UX/UI designers, back-end developers, testers, and project managers. And since you will mostly be engaged in written communication, your prospective employer would easily want to assess you for the same.
In any case, written communication strips you from the luxuries of body language and tone of voice to augment your communication. Therefore, it’ll be extremely important for you to hone your writing skills for it to become naturally concise, crisp, unambiguous, and formal. And though communication is essentially a soft skill, you would want to become skilled with the commonly used communication tools like Google meet, Skype, and now Zoom too., to facilitate its practical side as well.
2. Collaboration:
As mentioned above, development is a team’s job, and as a remote front-end developer, you’ll be required to coordinate with your team almost all day. When such is the case, it becomes imperative that you develop and hone your skills of collaboration. In doing so, your communication skills would definitely aid you a great deal, but they alone would not suffice. For better teamwork, you’ll need to learn how to be proactive and prompt.
Working remotely requires a lot more effort to maintain basic coordination than working in an office, and this is why it becomes the responsibility of all the team members, including yourself, to try to always be there when the team needs you. You should also be proactive in managing your time and completing your assigned tasks without constant supervision, all the while fostering a team spirit. And just like communication, there will be certain version control/git tools that you’ll need to master in order for the team collaboration to work in practice.
Hard Skills
3. HTML & CSS:
HTML is a markup language used for making web pages. It is the basic building block of a web front-end and an essential requirement for becoming a front-end developer. CSS or Cascading Style Sheets, on the other hand, is a language used for styling the webpage created with HTML. To take a simple analogy of a room, HTML would be used to create the walls, ceiling, floor, windows, and the door, while CSS would define the room’s theme, including what color the walls will be or the type of flooring material, etc.
And though it’s necessary for front-end developers to have an in-depth understanding of both CSS and HTML basics, they don’t really have to work from scratch with them in a real-life scenario. In almost all the cases, they’ll be hired to work with a framework that will have basic codes written already in them and one will only have to customize or augment those codes as per the project requirements. Two of the most popular such CSS frameworks are Bootstrap and Foundation, and an employer would actively look to hire developers with proven knowledge in either or both of them.
Other than the framework, front-end development has also been majorly simplified with the use of CSS preprocessors. These are the advanced versions of basic CSS, that offer more features to enhance the look and feel of a website whilst also making the entire process much easier for the developers. The popular CSS preprocessors, mastering which can land you a remote job much quicker are SASS and LESS.
4. Javascript:
To use our previous analogy, if HTML and CSS create and thematizes a room, Javascript is the most popular way to make things move about and function in it. Javascript, in short, is a scripting language, the most popular one out there*, that makes elements of the web page interactive (at the user’s end). Some of the most basic Javascript functions that you must have come across include, zooming in effect on hover of eCommerce websites and entering of data into the form, etc.
Now, just like CSS frameworks, some major JavaScript frameworks can make your entire job more efficient. These include Angular Js, ReactJS, Vue.js, Backbone, Ember, etc. While there are many more such frameworks, the five mentioned here are the most sought-after ones, based on which employers hire developers. Other than the framework, you would also like to master Javascript libraries, particularly jQuery, to further strengthen your arsenal with yet another most in-demand skill.
5. Browser Developer Tools
Eventually, all your work will be made available to the users on their web browsers. It is through these web browsers, the users will interact with the webpages, making them the most prominent tool for you to review your work in real-time. To simplify the review job for developers, most of the popular web browsers come equipped with a set of browser developer tools. These tools allow you to check and fine-tune your web pages by testing them right there on the browser. You can insert some tweaks to your half-finished webpage, change some code, in both HTML/CSS and Javascript to see the changes beforehand implementing them to your real code.
