I am a “Front end” developer – I have been working as one for about a month this coming week and I have been loving it and realizing how different coding for fun and coding for work is. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not all bad. There are good things like getting paid to do something you enjoy every day. Getting better at coding and being paid to do so. There are so many things that I want to continue learning and getting better at. I believe a good career should be like that. Getting paid to become better and better every day, whether it’s becoming more familiar with the latest software frameworks or the latest JavaScript standards.
This week, we were tasked with coming up with a project for a hackaton. I was struggling to come up with a good idea for it and ended up tinkering with the idea of Time-based factor authentication, my plan was to write my own hashing functions using the MAC algorithm standards and I think it was too much for me to chew on in a week. After spending a day following a tutorial on building a HOTP algorithm (otherwise known as a hash one-time password) I decided that the blog post code was not something that I could use. Not because it was bad code, but because I did not know if it had undergone testing. I found a TOTP-generator library and I plugged it into my project. Late into the week I began to realize that I am a front-end developer and I should be spending time learning front-end techniques.
I began to realize that what I’m doing is back-end development. Let me explain a bit, I was just finding the right libraries and sticking them all together without me actually writing any code that accomplished flashy and unique UI components. I fell into my workflow of writing a server and setting up the home route, specifying the HTML views engine for my express app, and passing objects to my views from the server otherwise known as back-end development. Not everything was lost, because in my attempts at writing a front-end application using server-side rendering (SSR) techniques I learned the difference between the two.
I will elaborate, in a front-end development framework like React, Vue, or Angular, the JavaScript files don’t have to be imported for the server to use. Instead, the JavaScript files are executed by the client’s browser. Initially, this upset me because I had spent all this time learning SSR and now here I am un-learning those techniques to implement front-end development techniques. But there is a silver lining, because now I understand – at least at a conceptual level of abstraction – the difference between a “front-end” developer and a “back-end” developer. I was a back-end developer and now I am becoming a front-end developer.
I had mistakenly assumed that in the workplace there were back-end and front-end developers working with the same framework (expressjs) and that the front-end people just did HTML and CSS and some JavaScript. While the back-end developers would build the routes, add the middleware, and implement the database call functions. Now I realize that is not how it works in the real world. Not all is lost with this week’s hackaton. I am presenting my back-end product this Friday and I will talk about what I learned and how this project helped me see the important difference between FE and BE when it comes to frameworks. This new knowledge will help me set my development and evaluation goals for my job which is something that I have been trying to figure out. And for tomorrow’s meeting I will be bringing a back-end app to a front-end fight.
