

The Rise of the Front-End Developer - sudhirj
http://devblog.eduhub.nl/frontend-developer-worth-millions

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dts
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.

~~~
rubzie
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...

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blauwbilgorgel
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 :)

~~~
rubzie
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 :)

~~~
blauwbilgorgel
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.

~~~
vindia
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!

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edo
Does anyone know if there's a guide anywhere on how to write the 'non-nerd
hackable code' described here? Sweet article btw.

~~~
wccrawford
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.)

~~~
rubzie
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...

~~~
bilban
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!

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narag
Hmmm, the list of skills, that should be interesting because it seems to be
the core of the "millionaire" thing, is in Dutch. Ouch!

~~~
rubzie
The disclaimer is not actually to be read, it's just a joke to say that I am
just listing skills as I see them, from my limited perspective as a business-
owner :)

