Jens Oliv­er Meiert:

In order to become a bet­ter fron­tend devel­op­er you don’t become a back­end devel­op­er, you become a bet­ter design­er and advo­cate for the user—in a sense of acquir­ing an under­stand­ing of design as well as empa­thy for users.

When oth­er devel­op­ers look and talk down on fron­tend devel­op­ers they don’t only show igno­rance of the scope and size of fron­tend devel­op­ment, they then also dis­tract fron­tend devel­op­ers from their mission—because that mis­sion is not to walk fur­ther into the serv­er room, but to open the win­dows and look at the users out there.

First off, Tobi’s com­ments that spurred this arti­cle are moron­ic, and I’m sure fron­tend devs at Shopi­fy were delight­ed to see the CEO dis­par­age their pro­fes­sion. I think it’s impor­tant to point out that when chal­lenged on his igno­rant com­ments, he didn’t retract or apologize.

In gen­er­al though, fron­tend devel­op­ment has been the sub­ject of many hot-takes about its worth­less­ness. Jens does a fan­tas­tic job of not only defin­ing how impor­tant the work we do is, but also chal­leng­ing us to do this work bet­ter. It is a reminder that the qual­i­ty of my work is not deter­mined by how much JavaScript I can write, or the fan­cy things I can do with CSS, but how my work impacts the peo­ple on the oth­er end of the screen.