Manik SharmaWhen you use a website or a mobile app, everything you see and interact with falls within the domain of front-end development. The role of a front-end developer is to design the look and feel of the application or website. It includes everything from interactivity, buttons, fonts, and colors to the general layout.
As a front-end web developer, you will be charged with creating a user experience as friendly and enticing as it can be across various platforms, browsers, and devices. And to achieve this goal, you will work with a combination of design, programming languages, and tools.
What are the everyday tasks of a front-end developer?
The front-end development role demands creativity, technological intelligence, and emotional intellect to create interfaces that add value to the user experience. In this role, you will be tasked with:
- Designing and overseeing the user experience of a website or an app
- Use technologies like HTML, CSS, and JavaScript to create front-end
- Include modern design patterns in your designs
- Maintain and update UI/UX interfaces you design
- Develop tools that can improve the website or app interaction
- Test and debug code
More advanced tasks such as API creation, CSS preprocessors, and cloud-based CDN are added to the responsibilities as you progress in your role.
What do interviewers expect from a junior front-end developer?
While interviewing a junior front-end developer, interviewers do not expect them to know everything. For a junior position, you won’t have to possess the depth of knowledge but the skills that show your creativity and ability to adopt technology and deliver solutions. Usually, employers look for the following traits in a junior front-end developer:
- Confidence in building simple things
- Ability to effectively break more significant problems into smaller ones
- Utilize Google to find optimum solutions for more minor problems
- Willingness to learn and commitment to work hard
- Knowledge of essential front-end technologies to start projects
- Ability to continue making progress in chunks
You must also know data structures and algorithms when interviewing with project-based companies. To learn more, check out top interview questions for front-end developers.
Skills every front-end developer must have
Level 1: Basic programming skills
Three core programming languages that you must master as a front-end developer: HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.
HTML is the most basic language for creating the layout of web pages or app interfaces. Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML) is the building block for any website or app. Browsers interpret HTML to understand how to display a web page or app.
CSS or Cascading Style Sheets is a decorative tool that adds visual elements to the HTML code. It is used to implement everything from font styles to colors and icons.
JavaScript is used by 98% of all the websites on the internet and is touted as the ‘language of the internet.’ The scripting language turns static web and app pages into dynamic and interactive content. You must have command over JavaScript and its frameworks to get hired.
Level 2: Front-end development frameworks and libraries
Frameworks and libraries are essential to quickly create websites and apps without writing features and capabilities from scratch. They are templates that provide existing code to work with that you can build upon to do your projects. Here are essential frameworks a front-end web developer must know.
Bootstrap: A free and open-source CSS framework, Bootstrap was created by Twitter to help front-end developers quickly design mobile-friendly websites and apps. It has many reusable code blocks written in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript that you can directly include in your projects.
React: Created by Facebook, React is a highly robust JavaScript library that builds incredibly fast UIs. React.js has a 40.14% market share and is the most widely used JavaScript framework to build the view layer for mobile and web applications.
AngularJS: Mostly used for single-page web applications or SPAs, AngularJS is an open-source JavaScript library created and maintained by Google.
jQuery: It is a framework that front-end web developers use to convert multiple lines of code into methods that can be called with a single line of code. jQuery is used for various applications such as HTML/DOM manipulation, cross-browser JavaScript development, and AJAX interactions.
How do you become a front-end web developer?
You start by learning the basics as listed above and move on to practice Level 2 skills. As a front-end developer, you will define user experience by creating interactivity and design solutions for the web and app interfaces.
To get started, you can utilize the tips shared in our guide on how to land a high-paying front-end developer job.
Once you are confident that you have the necessary skills, you can explore full-time and freelance opportunities for front-end developers. Talent500 is the platform that top front-end developers use to find opportunities with fast-growing startups and Fortune 500 companies. You can join us here.
Adarsh M
Ajay Yadav
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