5 Things every front end developer must be aware about - short & sweet

Introduction

With advancement of technologies only knowing HTML, CSS, JQuery is not enough for a front end developer.

We have lot of tools and frameworks introduced to developers world that ease developers life as well as help to help make more reliable and bug free web applications.

Following are 10 things that every front-end developer should consider.


1. Frameworks

Frameworks are there to make developers life easy and to avoid some common problems developers face to start and continue a project.

Through a framework you can easily forget some common problems like browser compatibility, performance issues, since it is already addressed through the framework.
Level of already addressed problems may depend on framework to framework.

We have listed below best frameworks for front-end development which address most of the issues that front-end developers face.

React.js
Vue.js


2. GraphQL

While REST has long been consider the de facto standard for designing web APIs by offering great concepts like stateless servers, RESTful APIs are more and more considered inflexible when it comes to keeping up with the rapidly changing clients accessing them.
GraphQL was developed by Facebook to tackle the exact issues developers are facing when dealing with Restful APIs.
With REST APIs, developers would gather data by fetching it from multiple endpoints that have been created with a specific purpose — like, for example, a /users/<id> endpoint or a /tours/<id>/location endpoint.
Using GraphQL, this would work differently. Developers would send a query to a GraphQL server with their data requirements. The server would then return a JSON object with all the corresponding data.
Another benefit of using GraphQL is it uses a strong type system. Everything on the GraphQL server is defined via a schema using the GraphQL schema definition language (SDL). Once the schema has been created, both front-end and back-end developers can work quite independently from one another because they're aware of the defined data structure.
If you want to learn more about GraphQL, check out these great resources:
GraphQL


3. Code Editors/IDEs

Microsoft's VS Code will be the number one editor for most front-end engineers.
It offers almost IDE-like features, like code completion and highlighting, and can be extended almost infinitely via its extension marketplace.

The marketplace, in particular, is what makes VS Code so awesome. Here are some great extensions for you as a front-end developer:
JavaScript (ES6) code snippets
npm
Prettier
CSS Peek
Vetur
ESLint
Live Sass Compiler
Debugger for Chrome
Live Server
Beautify

Give it a try if you haven't used it already.


4. Testing

Testing is crucial.
Testing the app is the main thing when deliver to end user.
In real world applications money drives everything. Thus the untested code means the lose of money on the project.

Following flow of testing needs to be done before any project goes live

Unit tests

Testing a single component or function in isolation.

Integration tests

Testing interactions between components.

End-to-end test

Testing full-blown user flows in the browser.

There are more ways of testing, such as manual testing, snapshot testing, etc. If you want to move to a senior developer position or aim for a job with a large corporation that has some development standards, you should try to work on your testing skills.


5. Soft Skills

Even though soft skills are ignored much, following qualities needs to be in a front-end developer if a project needs to be success.
Even you are seasoned developer following qualities will make the project and every ones life easier.

Empathy
Communication
Teamwork
Easy approach and helpfulness
Patience
Open-mindedness
Problem-solving
Accountability
Creativity

Time management

Always remember: The most important deliverable for a senior developer is more senior developers :)