I have been thinking about this as of late and wanted to yap a bit

throughout my past jobs every single one required me to work with websites/GUIs/web apps etc.

My first job was as a web developer for UMD’s resident life department → I managed the content on the web pages, from HTML + CSS + Bootstrap to using a CMS called Drupal, tracking Google Analytics, and teaching my manager Git

For another job I was building web interfaces using Node, Express, and React to fetch and display data streaming in from live hardware → this was a contract position but I got to learn how an Express API was implemented and used as well as making clean, consistent, component based pages

In my last job I was working on something along similar lines, developing, installing, and troubleshooting IoT systems, also including a React based front end that displayed data from Microsoft SQL Servers → each client ran a customized instance of our software and had us on call for network and data related issues, as well as hardware that was not working. I even got to work with device firmware and drivers, learning how data was mapped through ports and fed into a server for the web app to read

I’ve deduced the following,

to be a good frontend dev you need to be able to…

• visualize and apply geometry and math → when it comes to aligning components, making things look uniform, making aesthetic tweaks with component sizes, and building animations that are sensitive to speed, layouts, and states, you Have to be able to see the math in it all and apply as needed
• understand grouping, inheritance, topology, and how the DOM is being rendered → components are like blocks that you can use and reuse, style choices need to be grouped to maintain consistency and reused easily, when one component is rendering another inside itself or side by side, there’s a lot of patterns/grouping/subsets that you need to understand and keep track of
• have an eye for design → I never took any sort of design classes or learned much about art formally but I can tell you if a website looks pretty or ugly. a lot of people make really ugly websites, maybe aesthetics change over time, but I think design people understand how each detail, from fonts to sizes to colors to animations, can weave together to form a visual experience, not just a website, that captures a user and keeps them scrolling

It can be extremely tedious and frustrating, especially when you are working with data and components that you do not have direct control over, but it is art

Learning to work around ugly formatting, displaying content in a way that is aesthetic and attention grabbing, timing animations to create a specific visual, each detail is painting a larger picture and it’s literally art