2009 was the last time I worked full time as a front-end developer, until late 2021 when I did another career change and got into it again. Holly Molly how things change in 13 years.
Back then Javascript wasn’t even a requirement to do your job. It was great to have it, but knowing how to create a website was enough for most places. Accessibility, making sure things work on every browser were the key aspects of the job. Heck responsive web design wasn’t even a thing, Ethan Marcotte coined the term in 2010. jQuery was the emerging winner of the fight to create a flavour of JS that would work on every browser, but mootools was a tight contender.
Move the clock 13 years and the front of the front-end is something you barely spend any time working on. There are 456 trillion frameworks and approaches to JS. Every day a new thing appears and none of it actually change the basics of how you compose a website, just how convoluted your journey is going to be to get there.
I took the State of Javascript survey and I don’t think I’ve heard half of the stuff they were talking about. They even had the nuts of telling me that based on my knowledge I was on the top 100% of people. Yes, literally nobody else knows less that I do. Thanks guys.
I appreciate you can’t roll back the clock and go back to how we built sites all those years ago. Some of that new complexity actually helps. But bloody hell, can people just stop creating new ones, sit down and agree a way of working that makes sense for 90% of the sites? There’s no need to have 456 trillion options when we’re doing the same websites.