| With the rise of single page applications there is immense demand for the rigor and form that seasoned back-end developers can bring to front-end teams. Immense state trees, webworkers, asynchronous changes, tiered caching, pre-emptive fetching, modularization, optimistic rendering, validation, behavioral analytics, testing and more. This is all without even getting started on actual presentational aspects. The pace of the ecosystem in recent years and the immense amount of legacy code (10 years+) that doesn't scale to growing teams/projects is a problem everywhere you look. The good news is companies looking to bring their front-end up to date are facing the same foreboding sense you have that comes with the unfamiliar. Fragmentation is coalescing around major frameworks and fringe features from a few years ago are standards today. It's not too late, understanding the tooling is critical (end-to-end IDE through to the browser and beyond) and will provide you with a solid basis.
Follow this up by reading the APIs of major frameworks then pick one (any one, it doesn't matter) and build something with it. |