The Rise of the Front-End Developer(devblog.eduhub.nl)
devblog.eduhub.nl
The Rise of the Front-End Developer
http://devblog.eduhub.nl/frontend-developer-worth-millions
4 comments
The actual title of the article is "10 Skills to Become a Frontend Developer worth millions" with key points such as "#7 Be a conversion-horny UX nerd" and "#8 Write non-nerd hackable code". Of all the skills listed only one of them, the previously mentioned #8, requires some degree of vague technical proficiency. The other points involve having a desirable personality trait or simply using an existing web service. If that is worth millions hire me. I am UX-horny and I know how to click buttons and watch pretty graphs.
The talk / post is meant for frontend developers. So if you're a great frontend developer, and you have these skills, I'm sure you're worth millions. My whole point is that simply churning out HMTML/CSS/JS isn't enough anymore, you need more skills these days...
Thanks for this article. Eduhub is doing exciting agile development and they have chosen a great business model (scalable lead generation).
I am a front-end developer too. I also like conversion rate optimization -- you have to expand your skillset, but value standards adherence, accessibility and performance as core features for a good front-end developer.
May I be so bold as to suggest that you eat my dogfood? At a glance I'd fix the 52 Validation errors and 34 warnings for W3C validation of the homepage. I'd also look at Google page speed/Yslow and follow their tips: minify your css and javascript, combine other resources, and leverage browser caching. Should make a hefty difference in performance on a site of that scale and traffic.
Or at least look at adding performance and standards/accessibility in your top 10 as a front-end developer. Marketing, your SEO or statistics co-founder can always do your A/B tests, bar maybe the technical implementation (though Visual Website Optimizer is very easy to use and implement). As my mom used to say: finish your plate first, else you won't get your dessert :)
I am a front-end developer too. I also like conversion rate optimization -- you have to expand your skillset, but value standards adherence, accessibility and performance as core features for a good front-end developer.
May I be so bold as to suggest that you eat my dogfood? At a glance I'd fix the 52 Validation errors and 34 warnings for W3C validation of the homepage. I'd also look at Google page speed/Yslow and follow their tips: minify your css and javascript, combine other resources, and leverage browser caching. Should make a hefty difference in performance on a site of that scale and traffic.
Or at least look at adding performance and standards/accessibility in your top 10 as a front-end developer. Marketing, your SEO or statistics co-founder can always do your A/B tests, bar maybe the technical implementation (though Visual Website Optimizer is very easy to use and implement). As my mom used to say: finish your plate first, else you won't get your dessert :)
Thanks for the feedback! We'll certainly work on the points you mentioned, although validation is no goal in itself for us.
We just hired our first frontend developer actually, so far we are still recycling the original (very well validating) templates an external agency made for us, but of course over time they've "broken" in terms of validation.
Optimizing is something we'll do for sure in our redesign since we'll redo all the HTML anyway. My guess is that it won't be a hefty difference as you suggest, since our pages already load in 1,6s on average for NL users (via Pingdom).
We can go a bit further in caching with Nginx too btw.
On your last point: to a certain extent it's true that the SEO or other marketing guys can also make tests. But in practice, for the most interesing tests you really need a frontender, the basic stuff you can do with VWO and some CSS hackery doesn't bring us much anymore.
Be sure that we try to eat our plate, but we won't eat it for the sake of emptying it. Desert might be more efficient, and there's always the next meal (day) with new opportunities that need chasing. You're 100% right in theory, but not in practice :)
Optimizing is something we'll do for sure in our redesign since we'll redo all the HTML anyway. My guess is that it won't be a hefty difference as you suggest, since our pages already load in 1,6s on average for NL users (via Pingdom).
We can go a bit further in caching with Nginx too btw.
On your last point: to a certain extent it's true that the SEO or other marketing guys can also make tests. But in practice, for the most interesing tests you really need a frontender, the basic stuff you can do with VWO and some CSS hackery doesn't bring us much anymore.
Be sure that we try to eat our plate, but we won't eat it for the sake of emptying it. Desert might be more efficient, and there's always the next meal (day) with new opportunities that need chasing. You're 100% right in theory, but not in practice :)
Yes, I heard somewhere deep under the hood eduhub.nl is WordPress. Code can be poetry ;)
Validation offers little business value. My reply was perhaps a bit old-fashioned. Why eat your plate, when you can only eat desserts? But validation is a prerequisite for accessibility. Accessibility may or may not add business value -- like an architect that designs houses for people between 190 cm and 165cm might not ever face a problem.
I think Pingdom is not about page speed, but ping speed. Things like javascript resources won't be downloaded in parallel right now, no matter the Pingdom score: combining your 7 jQuery plug-ins will increase page speed.
You really need a front-ender for the exciting stuff, I agree. A statistician with front-end experience would be even better.
I understand that in iterating fast like you are, you might leave some crumbs, to move on to bigger and better things. But also in practice, as a good front-end developer, part of a good team, it is possible to validate and speed-optimize even the largest of sites.
And the multi-functionality you rightfully demand from a front-ender, you can extend to every scrum team member. That means if the front-ender hands in a valid template, back-end devs should take care (know just enough) to not invalidate it.
Validation offers little business value. My reply was perhaps a bit old-fashioned. Why eat your plate, when you can only eat desserts? But validation is a prerequisite for accessibility. Accessibility may or may not add business value -- like an architect that designs houses for people between 190 cm and 165cm might not ever face a problem.
I think Pingdom is not about page speed, but ping speed. Things like javascript resources won't be downloaded in parallel right now, no matter the Pingdom score: combining your 7 jQuery plug-ins will increase page speed.
You really need a front-ender for the exciting stuff, I agree. A statistician with front-end experience would be even better.
I understand that in iterating fast like you are, you might leave some crumbs, to move on to bigger and better things. But also in practice, as a good front-end developer, part of a good team, it is possible to validate and speed-optimize even the largest of sites.
And the multi-functionality you rightfully demand from a front-ender, you can extend to every scrum team member. That means if the front-ender hands in a valid template, back-end devs should take care (know just enough) to not invalidate it.
You heard that (partially) wrong. The only part of Eduhub that is Wordpress is the article section and then only the backend part of that. All the article views and the rest of the site are served by CakePHP.
Most (not all) of the validation errors on our page are caused by external Javascripts (eg. VWO) by the way. But you do raise a valid point about some performance related issues, like minifying JS/CSS and combining files. The good news is, we're working on that!
Most (not all) of the validation errors on our page are caused by external Javascripts (eg. VWO) by the way. But you do raise a valid point about some performance related issues, like minifying JS/CSS and combining files. The good news is, we're working on that!
Does anyone know if there's a guide anywhere on how to write the 'non-nerd hackable code' described here? Sweet article btw.
You might be surprised at how easy it is for non-nerds to hack on HTML a bit.
Here's my guide:
1) Use CSS! Hide all that confusing color and placement code away from them.
2) Emphasize readability in the code. Spacing between sections, everything on it's own line, comments that tell even non-programmers where to put things (header, content, footer, etc)
3) MVC. Especially templating. Keep real code away from the stuff they'll be changing, like text and images.
Having said that, is it worth it? Only the parts that help programmers (including yourself) as well. Most clients will not get their hands dirty in this stuff out of simple fear, and they certainly won't pay you extra for it. (Assuming you gave a single quote up front and aren't getting paid hourly.)
Here's my guide:
1) Use CSS! Hide all that confusing color and placement code away from them.
2) Emphasize readability in the code. Spacing between sections, everything on it's own line, comments that tell even non-programmers where to put things (header, content, footer, etc)
3) MVC. Especially templating. Keep real code away from the stuff they'll be changing, like text and images.
Having said that, is it worth it? Only the parts that help programmers (including yourself) as well. Most clients will not get their hands dirty in this stuff out of simple fear, and they certainly won't pay you extra for it. (Assuming you gave a single quote up front and aren't getting paid hourly.)
On your last bit: I think clients indeed wo't pay for stuff like that, yet. They're learn the coming years that you either have to have a dev team (incl. front-enders!) in-house, or you should work with your agencies like they share your goals. Only then will they start to appreciate things like code quality...
Believe me, they won't ever appreciate code quality - they just care that it works. Clients get more hung up over a typo than clean markup!
So, basically, the same best practices all front end developers should be following anyway.
Hmmm, the list of skills, that should be interesting because it seems to be the core of the "millionaire" thing, is in Dutch. Ouch!