Professional Frontend Engineers
One issue we always seem to run into as front end web professionals is a lack of understanding from within the industry, and from the external world at large, about what it is we actually do. People generally consider websites as easy to design and produce. But when you think about it for a little time you realise that most people only have the visual interface for assessing what we’ve done. Even worse, if we’ve done a good job then the complexity is transparent!
Nate Koechley’s video explaining Professional Frontend Engineering (about 90 minutes) goes a long way to filling in those gaps. I’d also recommend listening to Bill Buxton speak about Design with a big D and the Design Ecosystem. The very nature of what we’re employed to do on projects is to minimalise most of those things you would have otherwise stumbled over.
The website you sit down and use is the tip of a very large iceberg, in fact. The better the team below that berg the better your user experience, the faster the rendering, the better the adaptability to other browser environments and platforms. If you don’t have to think then it’s probably because frontend engineers (whatever the job tag) considered the technicalities and implemented the solution. And when we’re really good you won’t notice our footprint at all.
