Your comparison is about a person that gets paid to build things out of wood and a person that does it for fun. That is not an appropriate comparison for what is being discussed here.

Whether you like it or not, there are people who get paid to be front-end developers but who don’t have as many skills as you or John! )

I think it would have been great to see John post a mature, well-articulated response to my article, without all the drama. I’m always willing to learn and correct my views.

(And for the record, I do agree with John about the ROR section, but as far as everything else, he misses the point completely.)

A front-end developer is essentially anyone that works on the front end. John is absolutely right: True front-end developers should have much more than what I listed. But I’d be interested to see John’s own list of nice-to-haves, and a job posting that agrees with him — then maybe I’ll concede his points!

The point of my article was that knowledge and experience in those different areas are usually not listed as “must have” skills on Front-End developer job postings. They are commonly listed as “nice to haves”. So I outlined a bunch of them as best I could.

In no way am I claiming to have a full understanding of the need for those technologies.

But you cannot say that having knowledge and experience in those areas is not going to improve a Front End Developer’s marketability.

And again, your bizarre claim that a “rank amateur” is in your opinion not a developer, is exactly that: your opinion.

I think you made some good points, John, but you really are lacking an understanding in the purpose of my post.

Your comments on SEO show precisely how you’ve missed the point. You’re basically saying that it’s better to not know advanced SEO techniques than to know advanced techniques. That is quite interesting!

IMHO, the original post wasn’t targeted at “front-end developers” at all — it was targeted at people with a passing knowledge of HTML and CSS who like to call themselves front-end developers. Businesses hire those folks at their peril — and then they pay real front-end developers to clean up the mess.

You’re absolutely right about differentiating front-end from back-end engineers. I got lost on that while attacking [Other Blogger]’s points.

You are also right-on about my “simple database” statement. Thanks for pointing that out!

I can’t believe you said this:

We’re talking about FRONT-END developers here!

You just denigrated yourself and your entire readership (and me)!

I think I’d reserve the term “rank amateur” to any engineer, developer, or manager who still doesn’t realize how critical a stellar front-end engineer is to their web application. Just take a look at Facebook’s JS/CSS/HTML code. It’s a mess. They certainly don’t have any sense of a front-end architecture, and they’re obviously struggling to make their front end work at all.

Java and PHP engineers who can hook up a page to a database are a dime-a-dozen (but ones who can make it scale are harder to find). Front-end engineers who can create a maintainable, extensible, customizable, cross-browser, high-performance web app are very hard to find these days. (I think that “maintainable” is the most esoteric by far.)

Companies are slowly understanding that front-end developer positions are not best filled by college grads anymore. It’s been a bit slow for them to get it — until recently, that is. The future is bright for experienced front-end engineers.

Do your readers a favor. Give them some advice that will get them out of “rank amateur” status, rather than send them down a dead end. Most of your recommendations won’t help them obtain a job that’s any more exciting than as a maintainer of a small web site for a coffee shop (a.k.a. a “webmaster”).

There you go. Rename your post to “10 Nice-to-have skills for a webmaster“. Then I’ll retract my post.

I do take issue though with your generalization of SQL, database methods like stored procedures and differences between databases. In my opinion, this is not the role of the Front End developer, but these differences are crucial when it comes to performance (tuning), scalability, throughput and efficiency. When you’re talking 20,000 transaction per hour or thousands of concurrent users at a time there is no such thing as a “simple database.”

Thanks for the comments on my article. I like strong opinions and I’m certainly up for a good debate! )

Anyhow, I don’t have time right now to read your whole article, I’ll get back to it. But from what I’ve scanned, it really looks like you’re missing the whole point of my post.

My post is geared towards people who ARE essentially “rank amateurs”. That’s the purpose of the post, to let some of the newer developers know that there are a lot of things they could add to their development repertoire that will increase their chances of landing a project/position.

Your categorization of anyone that doesn’t know “subversion” (sorry, but everyone I’ve worked with calls it “ess-vee-en”) as a “rank amateur” is quite narrow-minded.

We’re talking about FRONT-END developers here!

But thank you for your thoughts!