The Shifting Definition of Front-End Developer

January 19th, 2015

I don’t agree with the conclusion of this post:

Let’s define “front-end” to mean the parts of the app relating to user interface, rather than those that happen to be running in the browser’s JavaScript VM.

But I think the author definitely taps into a real issue:

The real problem is the perception that any code running in the browser is front-end code.

Let’s face it: programming something in Angular and Ember has much more in common with programming something in Rails or Django than it has with writing HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.

This is something we’re running into at Clearleft: we’ve never done backend programming (by choice), but it gets confusing if a client wants us to create something in Angular or Ember, “because that’s front end code, right?”