What is web front-end development? Prospects for front-end engineers in 2017

What is web front-end development?

Many beginners are still unfamiliar with the WEB front-end and don’t knowWhat is the web front-end? What does the web front end do? AndWhat do you need to learn about web front-end technology? In factWeb front-end development is also jokingly called "web front-end development siege lion", and this position is currently also called "big front-end". Many people don’t know how this position is called, so let me tell you secretly: It was actually the Taobao team who invented the localized name. Due to historical reasons, Taobao rose rapidly after 2005, and the number of visits exploded. The user experience of Taobao has been greatly tested and it is urgent to make progress.

Then Taobao officially had the word [web front-end development] and the recruitment position for the first time. Maybe other websites also thought of such a description, but after all, Taobao, which is well-known, attracts a lot of attention. Naturally, word of mouth spread, and the term front-end development was carried forward.

In the early days, the Web front-end was not called the front-end, but was affectionately called "Web Designer". Yes, you read that right, that's the name. I remember that time [Web Page The saying "Three Musketeers" is flying all over the world. If you master these three bastards, you are really bastard, and you can be called a web designer.

The Three Musketeers of Web Pages (Flash, Dreamweaver, Firewoks) are also known as Macromedia's Three Musketeers of web page production. Since they are products of the same company, they have a very close integration in terms of functionality. Later, after Firewoks was acquired by Adobe, a perverted giant, PS basically replaced Firewoks for web design work. Although I know that some people still use it, it is probably a nostalgia and some useful image cutting functions.

At that time, if web designers wanted to enter this field, they had to master Dreamweaver. It does not mean that he was the only one who could write HTML and CSS, but its automatic prompts were really easy to use at the time. It's so powerful that you can easily accomplish what you want without using any brain cells. In the era when front-end tools and editors were scarce, this was definitely a magical level (of course, after I wrote more, I became familiar with it and basically didn’t need any prompts). There were many tutorials on building websites based on Dreamweaver back then. It was really an era full of gays and lesbians. Friends who are interested can learn about the historical products of these tools.

2005 At that time, most web pages looked like this:

Now web pages generally look like this:

What does a web front-end engineer mainly do? Knowledge and skills required by front-end engineers

Front-end engineers are an indispensable professional R&D role in the development of software products in the Internet era. In a narrow sense, front-end engineers use professional skills and tools such as HTML, CSS, and JavaScript to implement product UI design drafts into website products, covering user PC and mobile web pages, and dealing with visual and interactive issues. Broadly speaking, all parts of user terminal products related to vision and interaction are the professional areas of front-end engineers.

In fact, the core skills of front-end engineers are still: Html, CSS, and JS. In the product development process of a typical Internet company, the relationship between front-end engineers and other roles is roughly like this:

The front-end is the engineer closest to the product and design, and plays a role in connecting products and technology. The front-end is responsible for the parts that users can see, so it is also the engineer closest to the user.

In the era of multi-terminals, if a product supports both PC and mobile terminals, front-end engineers need to deal with more roles:

Front-end requirements Solving interface and interaction problems, in fact, problems at the UI level have always been a difficult problem in software engineering, because the UI is constantly changing. The compatibility of various browser versions, Web standards, mobile devices, and multi-terminal adaptation have given front-end engineers great challenges and also have high requirements on the capabilities of front-end engineers. Many UI problems have more than one solution, and many problems have very clever ideas and wonderful solutions. Front-end is a very creative group among engineers, because this industry requires rich creativity and imagination.

Front-end engineers are also the setters, practitioners and promoters of Web standards, and the current W3C standards are not limited to browsers, but also include various handheld smart devices, vehicle-mounted devices, smart homes, etc. In the future era of the Internet of Everything, front-end engineers will not only be engineers on web pages, but engineers in all fields of human-machine interaction. See:What do you need to learn to become an excellent front-end engineer?

Prospects for front-end engineers in 2017

The front-end in 2017 is not so much more cruel as it is more standardized. In the first two years, various trainings were conducted for several months Newbies who just come out and casually offer tens of thousands, tens of thousands, will be eliminated from the market.

Front-end development tools/compilation tools are gradually taking shape. Although they are not as complete as IDE environments for top-ranked programming languages ​​such as object-c, java, and C+, they are. The concept of engineering modularity has begun to take root in people's hearts. Those who write original HTML CSS Javascript code these days are either small projects or novices. The browser runs the Iron Triangle: css html js. If the existing browsers remain unchanged, these necessary files will be less and less likely to be written directly by engineers in the future. Instead, they will choose a compilation tool. You can write it in your favorite emerging language, and then compile it into an Iron Triangle file that the browser can recognize. Of course, it is not ruled out that the browser can directly run less, scss, ts and other files in the future. This is possible. For details, please refer to: I heard that you want to write front-end in 2017?

The front-end work in 2017 is more challenging and the directions are more diverse. VR and small programs are very popular recently, and a large number of companies are recruiting front-end talents. 2017 will be a year for front-end engineers to show off their skills. Of course, as long as you have good skills, it is normal to earn a monthly salary of tens of thousands!

But technology is only a part of life. I used to be ambitious, but now I keep my head down and write code. Change what can be changed, accept what can not be changed. Life is limited, brothers fight for the day and night. The attitude towards life learning is: neither impatient nor impatient, neither fast nor slow. Persevere and believe in yourself. Don’t seek to change the world, but seek to change your own life. Don’t ask for a flying stride, but ask for one step at a time. Thanks to suffering, it makes us stronger inside. Thanks to setbacks, they make us continue to grow. Thanks to bugs, they make our thinking deeper. Thanks to the front end, he made us believe even more that it takes eighteen kinds of martial arts to hold up a sky.

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