It is very common for other software developers, software engineers and programmer’s generally to underestimate and look down on front end developers. Once you say all you know is HTML/CSS , you are looked down upon. It is like going to a hall full of gymnastics people when all you could do is a backflip , except that it is not.

Front end development is as hard as it can be . I am generally the backend guy and i decided to take this job that involves building both the front end and back end because of the cash . I knew HTML/CSS , or maybe that was what I thought . three weeks in and the front end looks like a bunch of toddlers were given pencils and a drawing book. To keep it short, it was ugly and it is still ugly .

This is not the site i designed, you need to be drunk with your eyes tied while typing with your feet to do this.

I use to be among those that looked down on front end developers like they are not the real deal .

Front end Development involves having a good sense of what it beautiful and what is not, what colors go together and what not. Questions like "where do I keep this button so it is optimal " keeps surfacing through out the whole process.

Code reuse in front end Development is next to impossible . let’s say you were doing back end stuff and having problem connecting to a database, you can go to stackoverflow and grab the code for it with your database server as the server and that’s it. When doing front end development and you need to achieve a particular type of button , you go to stackoverflow or codepen and copy code of a particular button you like into your code and bam!!!, everything goes haywire. Suddenly your nav is out of place , the space between two content is gone , the whole page looks like a mess. All you needed was a button but what you got is a button with page uglifier. One problem becomes multiple problem and the more you try to fix stuffs the more stuffs tries to fix itself .

it is even hard to do a nonsense job when it comed to front end

There are about 60000 CRUD App tutorial out there but no tutorial on how to design your website the way you envision it in your mind. Because your design is fresh and specific to you. You only find tutorials of how to layout stuffs and move stuffs.

Good UI design is hard , you have to make provision for all manner of devices . You have to make the whole navigation process easy and always try to relay more information to the user without clogging the entire screen.

Getting help as a front end developer is equally hard, you can’t just copy part of your code to stackoverflow to show them what you have tried, sometimes you need the entire HTML/CSS . Good luck finding someone that is ready to navigate your 1k+ lines of HTML/CSS in other to help you. Goodluck finding a debugger to debug your front end code.

I think it is time to start respecting the front end guys. As a back end guy you probably know just express,Ruby on rails and rarely both. The front end guy usually knows HTML/CSS , jquery, React , angular or vue, and a host of other stuffs. I think it’s time to start respecting this people. Imagine how the iPhone would look like with poor UI.

Apologies to every front end developer I looked down upon in the past .